Friday, April 29, 2011

Fwd: YEP: Trump Dogged By Rumors His Hair is Not From U.S.

It's time for a bit of levity.  One of our readers sent me this and I had to send it on....
--Kim




Subject: YEP: Trump Dogged By Rumors His Hair is Not From U.S.



What a hoot ..... Great Movement, count me in! 




Trump Dogged By Rumors His Hair is Not From U.S.




So-called "Balders" Movement Gathers Steam



http://www.borowitzreport.com/wp-content/uploads/DonaldTrumpHai
NEW YORK  – A threat to the fleedgling presidential campaign of Donald Trump emerged today, as a group of activists charged that Mr. Trump is not eligible to hold the nation's highest office because his hair does not originate from the U.S.

The group, who call themselves "Balders," claim that the hair-like substance that crowns Mr. Trump's head is from a foreign country, which would mean that the candidate is less than one hundred percent American.

"Time and time again, Donald Trump has refused to produce a certificate of authenticity for his hair," said Leeann Selwyn, a leading Balder.  "This is tantamount to a comb-over of the truth."

But if in fact Mr. Trump's distinctive mane turns out to be of foreign origin, such a revelation need not be fatal to his presidential hopes, says Professor Davis Logsdon, who has studied the history of presidential hair at the University of Minnesota.

"Remember, several of our greatest early presidents, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had hair that originated elsewhere," Mr. Logsdon says.  "The only thing that could kill Trump politically is if his hair turns out to be from France."

At a GOP event in Iowa, Mr. Trump made no reference to the Balders controversy, and instead sounded an upbeat theme: "If I am given the chance to do the same magic I did for NBC, America will be the number four country in the world."

In a piece of good news for Mr. Trump, a new poll showed a majority of likely voters agreeing with the statement, "Donald Trump being sworn in as President would be a great last scene in a Planet of the Apes remake."

 

 

 

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Fwd: From Wimp to Winner ANS

This is a good article and fairly short.  It was in the April 25 edition of Newsweek.  Sorry I don't have the link. 
This article basically says that Obama has been using his negotiating skills and they have been winning and all the liberals who are complaining that he isn't doing it right don't know how skilled he really is....
--Kim




From Wimp to Winner

Obama outmaneuvers his opponents­and his allies­every time.

(Page 1 of 2)

President Obama speaks at George Washington University on April Mark Wilson / Getty Images

President Obama speaks at George Washington University on April 13, 2011.

Ever since the warm, post-racial glow of Barack Obama's historic election victory evaporated two years ago­the rise of the oceans did not slow, and the planet, alas, did not heal­nary a day has passed without some Republican, somewhere, calling him a weakling, a wimp, or worse. But last week, as Obama prepared to respond to Paul Ryan's long-term budget plan with a proposal of his own, an unlikely group of kvetches joined the girlie-man chorus to carp about the president's once and future fecklessness: the nation's top liberal pundits.

Their problem was Obama's leadership style: either he lets others take the reins on tough issues, they said, or he makes preemptive concessions to Republicans. In The New York Times, Paul Krugman mocked the president as a "bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything in particular." The Daily Beast's Eric Alterman likened the leader of the free world to "a boxer who … [spends] the entire fight taking punch after punch on the ropes." And Jonathan Chait of The New Republic declared Obama a "horrendously weak" negotiator on the brink of becoming "a uniquely powerless president." The only thing missing was Keith Olbermann flapping his arms and clucking "chicken."

To hear Krugman & Co. tell it, Obama was all set to stride on stage at George Washington University, collapse into the fetal position, and announce that he was willing do whatever John Boehner wanted. What actually happened, however, was quite different. In a forceful 40-minute speech, the president outlined a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. The speech wasn't wholly liberal. But it hit most of the notes­raising taxes on the rich, shrinking the defense budget, protecting the social safety net­that liberals longed to hear.

How to explain the gap between what lefties feared Obama's speech would be and what it actually was? One interpretation is that after a long, lily-livered lull, the president finally decided to man up. But the truth is more complex. Whatever your opinion of Obama, "weakness" is not a particularly illuminating description of his leadership style. It makes more sense to see him as a hard-nosed pragmatist determined to maximize results. When liberals whine, says White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, it's like "a fourth-inning analysis of a nine-inning game. People say 'he screwed up the negotiations,' but the deal ends up being very good given the political reality."

More often than not, Obama's approach has worked in his party's favor. But it has also caused him problems. When Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the White House's top priority was simple: getting legislation passed. To accomplish that goal, Obama followed two rules. The first was that he would largely allow the legislative process to run its course before stepping in. As political scientist Frances Lee has explained, when a president voices an opinion, the entire issue becomes polarized. To test this, Lee studied how the Senate voted on questions that didn't have neat Democratic and Republican answers. Overall, these debates ended in party-line votes 39 percent of the time. But that number surged to 56 percent whenever the president took a stand. "Presidents getting involved can actually make things worse," says Lee

 

From Wimp to Winner

Obama outmaneuvers his opponents­and his allies­every time.

(Page 2 of 2)

President Obama speaks at George Washington University on April Mark Wilson / Getty Images

President Obama speaks at George Washington University on April 13, 2011.

Ever since the warm, post-racial glow of Barack Obama's historic election victory evaporated two years ago­the rise of the oceans did not slow, and the planet, alas, did not heal­nary a day has passed without some Republican, somewhere, calling him a weakling, a wimp, or worse. But last week, as Obama prepared to respond to Paul Ryan's long-term budget plan with a proposal of his own, an unlikely group of kvetches joined the girlie-man chorus to carp about the president's once and future fecklessness: the nation's top liberal pundits.

Their problem was Obama's leadership style: either he lets others take the reins on tough issues, they said, or he makes preemptive concessions to Republicans. In The New York Times, Paul Krugman mocked the president as a "bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything in particular." The Daily Beast's Eric Alterman likened the leader of the free world to "a boxer who … [spends] the entire fight taking punch after punch on the ropes." And Jonathan Chait of The New Republic declared Obama a "horrendously weak" negotiator on the brink of becoming "a uniquely powerless president." The only thing missing was Keith Olbermann flapping his arms and clucking "chicken."

To hear Krugman & Co. tell it, Obama was all set to stride on stage at George Washington University, collapse into the fetal position, and announce that he was willing do whatever John Boehner wanted. What actually happened, however, was quite different. In a forceful 40-minute speech, the president outlined a plan to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 12 years. The speech wasn't wholly liberal. But it hit most of the notes­raising taxes on the rich, shrinking the defense budget, protecting the social safety net­that liberals longed to hear.

How to explain the gap between what lefties feared Obama's speech would be and what it actually was? One interpretation is that after a long, lily-livered lull, the president finally decided to man up. But the truth is more complex. Whatever your opinion of Obama, "weakness" is not a particularly illuminating description of his leadership style. It makes more sense to see him as a hard-nosed pragmatist determined to maximize results. When liberals whine, says White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, it's like "a fourth-inning analysis of a nine-inning game. People say 'he screwed up the negotiations,' but the deal ends up being very good given the political reality."

More often than not, Obama's approach has worked in his party's favor. But it has also caused him problems. When Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the White House's top priority was simple: getting legislation passed. To accomplish that goal, Obama followed two rules. The first was that he would largely allow the legislative process to run its course before stepping in. As political scientist Frances Lee has explained, when a president voices an opinion, the entire issue becomes polarized. To test this, Lee studied how the Senate voted on questions that didn't have neat Democratic and Republican answers. Overall, these debates ended in party-line votes 39 percent of the time. But that number surged to 56 percent whenever the president took a stand. "Presidents getting involved can actually make things worse," says Lee.

The second rule was that when Obama did weigh in, he would support the best possible proposal instead of the best imaginable proposal. The White House slashed the stimulus from $1.2 trillion to $787 billion to preempt congressional objections. After declaring himself "a proponent of a single-payer universal-health-care program," the president wound up backing a more conservative plan than Richard Nixon. And last December's tax deal forced Obama to abandon his pledge to end the Bush cuts for the richest 2 percent right off the bat.

Obama's initial leadership strategy was tailored to a time when Republicans couldn't torpedo his agenda. In policy terms, the approach paid off, helping him put more points on the board during his first two years­the stimulus package, health-care reform, financial reregulation, and so on­than any president since LBJ. But the political result was a commander in chief who was left looking less engaged, less effective, and less moderate than he actually was, and suspicious Democrats who were left wondering whether starting negotiations from a more liberal position would've produced even better results.

When Krugman's crew pounced on the president last week, this was the prism they were using to predict his behavior. But now that the GOP controls the House, no laws can pass without Republican support, and no Republicans will support anything the president proposes because they're afraid it will help him get reelected. This changes the contours of Obama's pragmatism: in 2009 and 2010, he could champion progressive legislation; in 2011, he can only defend against the GOP's most objectionable ideas­and position himself to win a second term. That's precisely what he did at GWU. By baiting Republicans into moving first, Obama was able to present his proposal as the "more balanced" alternative to Ryan's "Path to Prosperity"­a plan he made sure to frame, campaign style, as an extreme attempt to finance "$1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy" by dismantling "care for seniors and poor children."

Some Democrats still worry that Obama's moderate debt package will "[become] the left pole, [with] the center … halfway between this and Ryan," as Krugman puts it. But it would be surprising, at this point, to see the president spend much political capital on meeting the GOP in the middle. Republicans will have little to run on in 2012 if they compromise, so they're unlikely to be cooperative negotiating partners. And Obama is savvy enough to know that when he said "I refuse to renew [the high-income Bush tax cuts] again" in his speech, he made it impossible for the taxophobic GOP to play ball. But that, it seems, was the point: a pre-election deficit deal was always going to be improbable, so might as well seize the center of the debate. "Even if you get shot down," says Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, "you can go to the people, say, 'This is what I offered,' and wind up looking like the grown-up."

At times, liberals have grumbled about Obama's policies, and Republicans almost always despise them. But the president's so-called weakness isn't to blame. Last week reports revealed that Obama's agreement with Republicans to slash $38 billion from the 2011 budget­the supposedly timid compromise that kindled the left's conniption­actually contained less than $25 billion in spending cuts, few of them to cherished Democratic programs. The same day, Public Policy Polling released a survey showing that independents, who backed Republicans 56 percent to 37 percent in 2010, now prefer Democrats 42 percent to 33 percent­a 28-point reversal. If those are the sort of things that happen when a president takes "punch after punch on the ropes," then Obama might want to keep getting slugged.

With Howard Kurtz

 

 

MIT Researchers Use Army of Subjugated Viruses to Build Solar Cells ANS

an interesting idea. 
Find it here:  http://www.dailytech.com/MIT+Researchers+Use+Army+of+Subjugated+Viruses+to+Build+Solar+Cells/article21468.htm  
--Kim

Science

  MIT Researchers Use Army of Subjugated Viruses to Build Solar Cells

Jason Mick (Blog) -
April 26, 2011 10:35 AM


[]
The M13 virus reproduces in bacteria and is used broadly in nanomanufacturing for its ability to load biominerals and to express a variety of useful proteins.  (Source: Ki Tae Nam/MIT)
[]
MIT trained the viruses to grab hold of carbon nanotubes and secrete a layer of light energy harvesting titanium dioxide.  (Source: MIT)
[]
The process could improve the efficiency of commercial dye-sensitized solar cells by a third or more, with a single low-cost step.  (Source: GigaOM)

Go my microscopic minions, go and power my empire!

It sounds like a mad scientist's dream come true.  Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have ensorcelled viruses with the wonders of modern genetic engineering and set them forth in building power capturing solar cells.

I. Research Down the Tubes -- in a Good Way

All solar cells at a fundamental level rely on some sort of energy harvesting layer.  For most cells today this layer is either a thin film or layers of elements deposited on a silicon substrate.

Outside of solar cells, in the realm of nanomedicine and materials engineering, carbon nanotubes are a hot item.  These nanoscopic tubes, composed of hexagonal units of bonded carbon, are super strong  -- and in some cases -- highly conductive.

Many researchers have considered tossing the tubes in solar cells, but early results were not promising.

Undeterred the MIT team set out to find why.  What they determined was that past efforts had failed as they deposited a mix of certain types of tubes that acted as conductors and certain types of tubes that acted as semiconductors.  Worse, the tubes clumped together, further impairing the efficiency.

In order to create the desired target -- a conductive nanotube layer -- the MIT team opted for a novel approach, enlisting the help of viral henchmen. Graduate students [] Xiangnan Dang and Hyunjung Yi, along with Energy Professor Angela Belcher [profile], found that a specific genetically engineered virus -- known as M13 -- improved the tube conductivity by reducing clumping and the number of semiconducting tubes.

Since they were already going the unconventional route, the team decided to test the newly created material layer on a special type of cell, based on titanium dioxide.  These TiO2 cells don't use a silicon substrate and are known commercially as "dye-sensitized" solar cells.  Their advantages include that they can be less expensive to produce and are lighter than silicon substrate designs.

Adding the nanotube layer improved the efficiency from 8 percent to 10.6 percent -- an increase of about a third.  And that huge boost comes despite the fact that the virus/nanotube mix only takes up 0.1 percent of the finished cell's weight.  Professor Belcher summarizes, "A little biology goes a long way."

II. How it Works

The virus is at the heart of the gains.  It offers two key effects.  The first is that it excretes proteins that literally "grab" the nanotubes.  Each virus secretes around 300 of these proteins, enough to hold 5 to 10 nanotubes in place.  Typically nanotube assembly requires high temperatures.  But thanks to the viruses, the nanotube mix is water-soluble and can be produced using an inexpensive room temperature, water-based process.

But that's not all.  The viruses contain a genetic "switch" which is flipped when the PH (acidity given by free hydrogen ions) changes.  At a certain PH the viruses begin to secrete titanium dioxide -- the material that is involved, along with dye/pigment, in producing electrons in the cell.

The nanotubes act as tiny wires.  Typically larger, less efficient physical wires would have to be attached to collect electrons at the bottom of the TiO2 layer.  But thanks to the marvelous viruses, the cell itself is interspersed with tiny wires, closing the distance and reducing efficiency losses.

III. From Viruses to Greenbacks -- Commercialization is Imminent

The team believes that approach which yielded this new material will be broadly applicable to other types of novel solar cells, as well -- like quantum dot or organic cell designs.  The viruses would likely be tailored to excrete novel compounds that would assist in the collection process for these cell types.

The M13 viruses reproduce by infecting bacteria.  They can be quickly and inexpensively mass produced using modern lab technology.

Prashant Kamat, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Notre Dame University and expert in the field of solar cells, gave high praise to the work, calling it "impressive".  He was surprised not only that MIT was able to overcome the long standing roadblock to building nanotube-based cells, but also that they did it in such novel fashion.

In MIT's press release he says that the team should be able to rapidly commercialize their discovery, stating, "Dye-sensitized solar cells have already been commercialized in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. [Given the efficiency gains] the industry is likely to adopt [the team's] processes."

Professor Belcher agrees pointing out that adding the new material essentially only adds one inexpensive step to the manufacturing process.  She expects the new process to enter the industry quickly.

The new work was published [ abstract] in the prestigious Nature Nanotechnology and was funded by the Italian company Eni (ADR:E), through the MIT Energy Initiative�s Solar Futures Program. 

Other participating members of the team included Chemical Engineering Professor Michael Strano [profile]; and four other graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.


Comments   Threshold

Monday, April 25, 2011

Obama Returns To His Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully! ANS

 I thought I had sent this out to you all, but I can't find it so I guess I didn't.  Forgive me if this is a repeat, but it is George Lakoff's latest article, his analysis of Obama's latest speech. 
Find it here:   http://georgelakoff.com/2011/04/17/obama-returns-to-his-moral-vision-democrats-read-carefully/
--Kim


Obama Returns To His Moral Vision: Democrats Read Carefully!

Posted on April 17, 2011 by georgelakoff

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Last week, on April 13, 2011, President Obama gave all Democrats and all progressives a remarkable gift. Most of them barely noticed. They looked at the President's speech as if it were only about budgetary details. But the speech went well beyond the budget. It went to the heart of progressive thought and the nature of American democracy, and it gave all progressives a model of how to think and talk about every issue.

It was a landmark speech. It should be watched and read carefully and repeatedly by every progressive who cares about our country ­ whether Democratic office-holder, staffer, writer, or campaign worker ­ and every progressive blogger, activist and concerned citizen. The speech is a work of art.

The policy topic happened to be the budget, but he called it "The Country We Believe In" for a reason. The real topic was how the progressive moral system defines the democratic ideals America was founded on, and how those ideals apply to specific issues. Obama's moral vision, which he applied to the budget, is more general: it applies to every issue. And it can be applied everywhere by everyone who shares that moral vision of American democracy.

Discussion in the media has centered on economics ­ on the President's budget policy compared with the Republican budget put forth by Paul Ryan. But, as Robert Reich immediately pointed out, "Ten or twelve-year budgets are baloney. It's hard enough to forecast budgets a year or two into the future." The real economic issues are economic recovery and the distribution of wealth. As I have observed, the Republican focus on the deficit is really a strategy for weakening government and turning the country conservative in every respect. The real issue is existential: what is America at heart and what is America to be.

In 2008, candidate Obama laid out these moral principles as well as anyone ever has, and roused the nation in support. As President, as he focused on pragmatics and policy, he let moral leadership lapse, leaving the field of morality to radical conservatives, who exploited their opposite moral views effectively enough to take over the House and many state offices. For example, they effectively attacked the President's health care plan on two ideas taken from the right-wing version of morality: freedom ("government takeover") and life ("death panels"). The attacks were successful even though Americans preferred the President's health care policies (no preconditions, universal affordable coverage). The lesson: morality at the general level beats out policy at the particular level. The reason: voters identify themselves as moral beings not policy wonks.

All politics is moral. Political leaders put forth proposals on the assumption that their proposals are the right things to do, not the wrong things to do. But progressives and radical conservatives have very different ideas of right and wrong.

With his April 13, 2011 speech, the President is back with the basic, straightforward idea of right and wrong that he correctly attributes to the founding of the country ­ as UCLA historian Lynn Hunt has observed in her important book Inventing Human Rights.

The basic idea is this: Democracy is based on empathy, that is, on citizens caring about each other and acting on that care, taking responsibility not just for themselves but for their families, communities, and their nation. The role of government is to carry out this principle in two ways: protection and empowerment.

Obama quotes Lincoln: "to do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves." That is what he calls patriotism. He spotlights "the American belief … that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security… that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard time or bad luck, crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us." He cites the religious version of this moral vision: "There but for the grace of God go I." The greatness of America comes from carrying out such moral commitments as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid.

Analogous moral arguments can, and should, be given constantly for all progressive policies at all levels of government on all issues: the environment, education, health, family planning, organizing rights, voting rights, immigration, and so on. It is only by repetition of the across-the-board moral principles that the voting public gets to hear how all these idea fit together as realizations of the same basic democratic principles.

Systems Thinking

President Obama, in the same speech, laid the groundwork for another crucial national discussion: systems thinking, which has shown up in public discourse mainly in the form of "systemic risk" of the sort that led to the global economic meltdown. The president brought up systems thinking implicitly, at the center of his budget proposal. He observed repeatedly that budget deficits and "spending" do not occur in isolation. The choice of what to cut and what to keep is a matter of factors external to the budget per se. Long-term prosperity, economic recovery, and job creation, he argued, depend up maintaining "investments" ­ investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, long-distance rail), education, scientific research, renewable energy, and so on. The maintenance of American values, he argued, is outside of the budget in itself, but is at the heart of the argument about what to cut. The fact is that the rich have gotten rich because of the government ­ direct corporate subsidies, access to publicly-owned resources, access to government research, favorable trade agreements, roads and other means of transportation, education that provides educated workers, tax loopholes, and innumerable government resources are taken advantage of by the rich, but paid for by all of us. What is called a "tax break" for the rich is actually a redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class­whose incomes have gone down­to those who have considerably more money than they need, money they have made because of tax investments by the rest of America.

The President provided a beautiful example of systems thinking. Under the Republican budget plan, the President would get a $200,000 a year tax break, which would be paid for by cutting programs for seniors, with the result that 33 seniors would be paying $6,000 more a year for health care to pay for his tax break. To see this, you have to look outside of the federal budget to the economic system at large, in which you can see what budget cuts will be balanced by increased in costs to others. A cut here in the budget is balanced by an increase outside the federal budget for real human beings.

What is a "system?"

Systems have the following properties:
  • Homeostasis: Stable systems are self-correcting or are correctable; they have indicators that have to stay within a certain range for the system to be stable. In an economy, there are indicators like unemployment, GDP, and so on. In global ecology, the temperature of the earth is a major indicator.
  • .

  • Feedback: Feedback can be controllable or uncontrollable. In our economy, the Federal Reserve uses indicators as feedback in an attempt to control certain aspects of the economy, using interest rates and the money supply. In the global environment, the global icecaps are an uncontrollable feedback mechanism. They reflect sunlight and heat, which has a cooling effect. As the earth gets warmer, they melt and get smaller, which lowers their ability to reflect and to cool, which makes the earth get warmer, which melts them more, which heats the earth more, and on and on.
  • .

  • Non-local and network effects: Global warming in the Pacific increases ocean evaporation. Winds blow the additional water vapor toward the northeast, pushing cold arctic air down over the East coast of the US, and the excess water vapor falls as a huge snowstorm. Warming in the Pacific can produce huge snowstorms on the East Coast of the US via such non-local effects.
  • .

  • Nonlinear effects: A small cause can produce a large effect. A few percentage points lowered in the tax rates of the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans can produce a trillion dollars of debt for the whole country over a decade.

When a system has causal effects, as in the above cases, we speak of "systemic causation." "Systemic risks" are the risks created when there is systemic causation. Systemic causation contrasts with direct causation, as when, say, someone lifts something, or throws something, or shoots someone.

Linguists have discovered that every language studied has direct causation in its grammar, but no language has systemic causation in its grammar. Systemic causation is a harder concept and has to be learned either through socialization or education.

Progressives tend to think more readily in terms of systems than conservatives. We see this in the answers to a question like, "What causes crime?" Progressives tend to give answers like economic hardship, or lack of education, or crime-ridden neighborhoods. Conservatives tend more to give an answer like "bad people ­ lock 'em up, punish 'em." This is a consequence of a lifetime of thinking in terms of social connection (for progressives) and individual responsibility (for conservatives). Thus conservatives did not see the President's plan, which relied on systemic causation, as a plan at all for directly addressing the deficit.

Differences in systemic thinking between progressives and conservatives can be seen in issues like global warming and financial reform. Conservatives have not recognized human causes of global warming, partly because they are systemic, not direct. When a huge snowstorm occurred in Washington DC recently, many conservatives saw it as disproving the existence of global warming ­ "How could warming cause snow?" Similarly, conservatives, thinking in terms of individual responsibility and direct causation, blamed homeowners for foreclosures on their homes, while progressives looked to systemic explanations, seeking reform in the financial system.

A Golden Opportunity

It is rare that a presidential speech provides such opportunities for Democrats, whether in office or not. The President has made overt the moral system that lies behind every progressive position on every issue. He has done it with near perfection. He went on offense, not defense. He didn't use conservative language tied to conservative ideas. He correctly tied his moral vision to the American moral vision and the very idea of American democracy ­ and patriotism. He used systems thinking throughout. He tied every part of his budget proposal to the American moral vision. And he showed clearly how the Republican budget rejected those American moral ideals in every case. It was not merely high political art. It is a model to be studied and followed.

There is one big problem with the speech that the president apparently felt he could not avoid: He stayed within Republican issue-framing, keeping to the Republican's definition of the issue as the deficit and the budget ­ even while the main features of the talk were his moral vision and systems thinking. The media and the politicos have mostly not been able to get beyond issue-thinking, that the speech was about the deficit and the budget, missing the larger themes. And the President, since the speech, hasn't pressed the political public on those major themes. He needs help. He needs progressives to start talking publicly about that moral vision and about the importance of systems in our lives and in our politics.

Finally, Democrats need to understand why expressing their moral views is so vital. The crucial voters in recent elections have been misleadingly called "independents," "moderates," and "the center." In reality, they are what I will call the "duals" ­ people who are conservative on some issues and progressive on others, in all kinds of combinations. They have both moral systems in the neural networks of their brains, but applied to different issues. When one moral network is activated, the other is inhibited ­ shut down. The more one moral network is active, the stronger it gets and the weaker the other gets. In 2008, the Obama campaign activated and strengthened the network for the progressive moral system ­ and won over the duals. In 2010, the Democrats stopped talking morality and kept on talking policy, ceding morality to the conservatives, especially the Tea Party radical conservatives. In doing this, they ceded the election. Policy without an understandable moral basis loses.

Democrats need to both activate their base and activate the progressive moral vision dormant in the duals among the voters. They can only do this with an overt appeal to the progressive moral vision inherent in our democracy. It's time for the Democrats to shout their patriotism out loud.

Details and Vision

Many progressives are skeptical about the President's ability ­ or even his desire ­ to live up to his moral vision. For example, the Progressive Caucus in the House has produced its own People's Budget, put forth as an alternative to both the president's and the Republicans'. But the People's Budget is an instance of the same moral vision articulated by the President. In short, progressives should look at this speech separating out the necessary budget details from the moral vision they all need to be expressing on every issue.

In addition, all progressives need to start thinking and talking in terms of systems. The nature of systems is central to understanding what is going wrong in ecosystems, financial systems, social systems, educational systems and even in particular systemic enterprises like deep-water drilling, frakking, nuclear energy, food production, and so on.

I would like finally to thank President Obama for bringing these issues to the fore.

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Fw: Health Care for All Senate Bill Action Alert ANS

Hi everybody -- I have been emailing with Shannon Miller, vice-chair of Health Care for all, and I asked for an article about it to send on to you all.  This is what she sent back.  An article may follow, but please consider taking this action toward Single-Payer Health Care for all in California.  It would cover all of us and save the state some money.  It turns out some of the legislators who voted "for" it before, did so because they knew Schwartzenegger would veto it. Now they are going back on that stance, and we can't let them. 
Insurance companies add no value to health care, they just add to the expense.  Please help. 
--Kim



Hi Kim,

This isn't an article, but it is the most urgent action that we need for Single-Payer in California.  We need Californians to call and fax letters of SB 810 endorsement to Rubio and Hernandez before May 4th.

Thanks,
Shannon Miller, Vice-Chair
Health Care for All - California

-
Health Care for All - California     Santa Barbara Chapter

 This is the second message we have sent in less than one week and unfortunately extraordinary circumstances have created this need. 

Action Alert!



Senate Bill 810 is at risk in the Senate Health Committee (to be introduced on May 4).

In particular, Senator Rubio has indicated that he will vote "no" and Senator Hernandez (committee chair) is undeclared.

We are urging you to contact these two Senators in as many ways as possible.  If you live in their districts please visit them.

All of us should fax and phone them urging their yes vote, regardless of whether we are in their district or not (the fact that they sit on a committee means that they represent ALL Californians, not just those in their district).

If you do not have access to a fax please feel free to respond to this message with your message and I will make sure it is faxed in.

Here is the contact information:

Senator Ed Hernandez, District 24
District Office
100 S. Vincent, Ste. 401
West Covina, CA 91790
Phone: (626) 430-2499
Fax: (626) 430-2494

Capitol Office
State Capitol, Room 4085
Sacramento, CA 95814
Phone: (916) 651-4024
Fax: (916) 445-0485

Senator Michael J. Rubio, District 16
Bakersfield Office
1800 30th Street, Suite 350
Bakersfield, CA 93301
Phone: (661) 395-2620
Fax: (661) 395-2622

Capitol Office
State Capitol, Room 2066
Sacramento,  CA  95814
Phone: (916) 651-4016
Fax: (916) 327-5989

What follows is an abbreviated message you may use when you contact the Senators:

We are calling/visiting to seek your support of SB 810;

While there is considerable focus on the recent national health reform legislation, it does not provide health care to every Californian. It is important that the California State Legislature continue its focus of getting all Californians insured with a single standard of care. It̢۪s just like an improved Medicare For All;

SB 810 will finally get healthcare costs under control, which will improve California̢۪s budget crisis;

SB 810 will save California̢۪s General Fund millions of dollars in the first year of implementation.

Please vote "Yes" to move SB 810 towards passage.



 

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Throw Out the Money Changers ANS

This is strong stuff.  Are we ready for a revolution?  I don't think so, but some do.  The power of denial is awesome....
Find it here:  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/blocking_the_gates_to_the_temples_of_finance_20110418/   
--Kim





Chris Hedges' Columns

Throw Out the Money Changers

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Posted on Apr 18, 2011
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By Chris Hedges

These are remarks Chris Hedges made in Union Square in New York City last Friday during a protest outside a branch office of the Bank of America.

We stand today before the gates of one of our temples of finance. It is a temple where greed and profit are the highest good, where self-worth is determined by the ability to amass wealth and power at the expense of others, where laws are manipulated, rewritten and broken, where the endless treadmill of consumption defines human progress, where fraud and crimes are the tools of business.

The two most destructive forces of human nature­greed and envy­drive the financiers, the bankers, the corporate mandarins and the leaders of our two major political parties, all of whom profit from this system. They place themselves at the center of creation. They disdain or ignore the cries of those below them. They take from us our rights, our dignity and thwart our capacity for resistance. They seek to make us prisoners in our own land. They view human beings and the natural world as mere commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. Human suffering, wars, climate change, poverty, it is all the price of business. Nothing is sacred. The Lord of Profit is the Lord of Death.

The pharisees of high finance who can see us this morning from their cubicles and corner officers mock virtue. Life for them is solely about self-gain. The suffering of the poor is not their concern. The 6 million families thrown out of their homes are not their concern. The tens of millions of pensioners whose retirement savings were wiped out because of the fraud and dishonesty of Wall Street are not their concern. The failure to halt carbon emissions is not their concern. Justice is not their concern. Truth is not their concern. A hungry child is not their concern.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky in "Crime and Punishment" understood the radical evil behind the human yearning not to be ordinary but to be extraordinary, the desire that allows men and women to serve systems of self-glorification and naked greed. Raskolnikov in the novel believes­like those in this temple­that humankind can be divided into two groups. The first is composed of ordinary people. These ordinary people are meek and submissive. They do little more than reproduce other human beings in their own likeness, grow old and die. And Raskolnikov is dismissive of these lesser forms of human life.

The second group, he believes, is extraordinary. These are, according to Raskolnikov, the Napoleons of the world, those who flout law and custom, those who shred conventions and traditions to create a finer, more glorious future. Raskolnikov argues that, although we live in the world, we can free ourselves from the consequences of living with others, consequences that will not always be in our favor. The Raskolnikovs of the world place unbridled and total faith in the human intellect. They disdain the attributes of compassion, empathy, beauty, justice and truth. And this demented vision of human existence leads Raskolnikov to murder a pawnbroker and steal her money.

The priests in these corporate temples, in the name of profit, kill with even more ruthlessness, finesse and cunning than Raskolnikov. Corporations let 50,000 people die last year because they could not pay them for proper medical care. They have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis, Palestinians and Pakistanis, and gleefully watched as the stock price of weapons contractors quadrupled. They have turned cancer into an epidemic in the coal fields of West Virginia where families breathe polluted air, drink poisoned water and watch the Appalachian Mountains blasted into a desolate wasteland while coal companies can make billions. And after looting the U.S. treasury these corporations demand, in the name of austerity, that we abolish food programs for children, heating assistance and medical care for our elderly, and good public education. They demand that we tolerate a permanent underclass that will leave one in six workers without jobs, that condemns tens of millions of Americans to poverty and tosses our mentally ill onto heating grates. Those without power, those whom these corporations deem to be ordinary, are cast aside like human refuse. It is what the god of the market demands.

When Dante enters the "city of woes" in the Inferno he hears the cries of "those whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame," those rejected by Heaven and Hell, those who dedicated their lives solely to the pursuit of happiness. These are all the "good" people, the ones who never made a fuss, who filled their lives with vain and empty pursuits, harmless perhaps, to amuse themselves, who never took a stand for anything, never risked anything, who went along. They never looked hard at their lives, never felt the need, never wanted to look.

Those who chase the glittering rainbows of the consumer society, who buy into the perverted ideology of consumer culture, become, as Dante knew, moral cowards. They are indoctrinated by our corporate systems of information and remain passive as our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government­tools of the corporate state­strip us of the capacity to resist. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. It makes no difference. Barack Obama serves corporate interests as assiduously as did George W. Bush. And to place our faith in any party or established institution as a mechanism for reform is to be entranced by the celluloid shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.



We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice. And this requires courage, not just physical courage but the harder moral courage of listening to our conscience. If we are to save our country, and our planet, we must turn from exalting the self, to subsuming of the self for our neighbor. Self-sacrifice defies the sickness of corporate ideology. Self-sacrifice mocks opportunities for advancement, money and power. Self-sacrifice smashes the idols of greed and envy. Self-sacrifice demands that we rise up against the abuse, injury and injustice forced upon us by the mandarins of corporate power. There is a profound truth in the biblical admonition "He who loves his life will lose it."

Life is not only about us. We can never have justice until our neighbor has justice. And we can never recover our freedom until we are willing to sacrifice our comfort for open rebellion. The president has failed us. The Congress has failed us. The courts have failed us. The press has failed us. The universities have failed us. Our process of electoral democracy has failed us. There are no structures or institutions left that have not been contaminated or destroyed by corporations. And this means it is up to us. Civil disobedience, which will entail hardship and suffering, which will be long and difficult, which at its core means self-sacrifice, is the only mechanism left.

The bankers and hedge fund managers, the corporate and governmental elites, are the modern version of the misguided Israelites who prostrated themselves before the golden calf. The sparkle of wealth glitters before them, spurring them faster and faster on the treadmill towards destruction. And they seek to make us worship at their altar. As long as greed inspires us, greed keeps us complicit and silent. But once we defy the religion of unfettered capitalism, once we demand that a society serve the needs of citizens and the ecosystem that sustains life, rather than the needs of the marketplace, once we learn to speak with a new humility and live with a new simplicity, once we love our neighbor as ourself, we break our chains and make hope visible.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His latest books are "Death of the Liberal Class" and "The World as It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress."

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Illinois Ends the Death Penalty­a Wake-up Call for California ANS

It saves money too. 
Find it here:  http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/site/node/8905 
--Kim


Illinois Ends the Death Penalty­a Wake-up Call for California

Posted on 21 April 2011
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[] By Natasha Minsker
ACLU of Northern California

The end of Illinois' death penalty comes at a time when more and more people express the view that the death penalty is ineffective, costly, and unjust. A slew of recent editorials and opinion pieces have highlighted the enormous problems with the death penalty in California in particular.  As these editorials and op eds show, it is time for California to cut this: the death penalty.

An editorial recently published in The San Jose Mercury, Pasadena Star News, Long Beach Telegram, and other papers, calls on Governor Brown to convert all death sentences to life imprisonment without any possibility of parole to the death penalty, to save the state $1 billion over the next five years. As these editorials point out, the money now wasted on the death penalty could be better spent to fund education and invest in public safety. Yet, at a time of financial crisis, the Governor and lawmakers are instead choosing to cut public safety, as well as healthcare and education, while remaining on track to spend $1 billion on the death penalty in five years.

"This," the editorial says, "is fiscal insanity."

Concerns about the number of innocent people sentenced to death also continue to grow. Many editorials praising Illinois for ending the death penalty, including one by the Register Guard of Oregon, noted that at least 20 people had been wrongly sentenced to death in that state alone.  A recent editorial in the LA Times observes that many other states, including California, have also mistakenly sentenced innocent men and women to death.  An editorial published in the Vallejo Times-Herald elaborates:

In just the five states that have abolished capital punishment in the last quarter century, 27 innocent lives were spared when it was learned they had been wrongly convicted. There's no way to determine how many were wrongly killed by the state.

More disturbing is that in the 34 states that still have the death penalty, more than 100 Death Row inmates have been freed. …

DNA, while an effective exoneration tool, is not helpful in many cases where such evidence plays no role. We don't know how many condemned inmates who proclaim their innocence actually are, but the system's inherent flaws indicate the strong possibility they exist. Any system that permits even one innocent man to die should be abolished.

California's death penalty is also a hollow promise to victims. Because we don't want to execute an innocent person, courts carefully review each death sentence, resulting in a long and cumbersome process that takes, on average, 25 years. As a result, the family members of murder victims are dragged through decades of painful court proceedings that, 99% of the time, do not end in an execution. Recently, the LA Times published an editorial written by retired Superior Court Judge Donald McCartin. McCartin, who presided over 10 murder cases in which he sentenced someone to die, said:

I am deeply angered by the fact that our system of laws has become so complex and convoluted that it makes mockery of decisions I once believed promised resolution for the family members of victims.

The only way to end the charade, McCartin concluded, is to end the death penalty:

It's time to stop playing the killing game. Let's use the hundreds of millions of dollars we'll save to protect some of those essential services now threatened with death. Let's stop asking people like me to lie to those victim's family members.

Aqeela Sherrills, whose son was murdered, and Judy Kerr, whose brother was murdered, echoed these sentiments in recent op eds. Noting that the state has cut funding for victims services, while maintaining spending on the death penalty, Kerr said:

There must be room for justice for victims in our budget. The death penalty is not where we will find it. Real justice comes from protecting each other and helping victims rebuild their lives after the devastating loss of a loved one. Instead of cutting funding for victims' services, cut this: the death penalty.

Illinois rightly concluded that the death penalty cannot be fixed but must be replaced with life without the possibility of parole, and redirected the money that had been wasted on the death penalty to victims' services and law enforcement.  Ask Governor Brown to do the same: cut the death penalty today.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Natasha Minsker is death penalty policy director for the ACLU of Northern California.
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Friday, April 22, 2011

If Walmart Paid its 1.4 Million U.S. Workers a Living Wage ANS

Here, someone has run the numbers and found that paying a living wage wouldn't make much difference to the consumer, though it would make a big difference to the wage-earner, and thence the economy. 
Find it here:  http://www.alternet.org/story/150685/if_walmart_paid_its_1.4_million_u.s._workers_a_living_wage,_it_would_result_in_almost_no_pain_for_the_average_customer?page=entire  
--Kim


If Walmart Paid its 1.4 Million U.S. Workers a Living Wage, it Would Result in Almost No Pain for the Average Customer

The average Walmart customer would pay just 46 cents more per shopping trip, or around $12 extra dollars each year.
April 20, 2011  |  
 
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A study released this week found that if the nation's largest low-wage employer, Walmart, were to pay its 1.4 million U.S. workers a living wage of at least $12 per hour and pass every single penny of the costs onto consumers, the average Walmart customer would pay just 46 cents more per shopping trip, or around $12 extra dollars each year.

Consider that the next time you hear some corporate mouthpiece warning of massive job losses if some minimally progressive policy were enacted. You never see them arguing on the cable news shows that increasing the minimum wage will hurt Walmart's or McDonald's bottom lines; it's always about the jobs that will be destroyed. According to the ubiquitous spin, large corporations, the embodiments of American-style capitalism, are so vulnerable to the meddling of no-nothing bureaucrats that any government intervention into the "free market" drives corporations away to sunnier locales or threatens their very existence. However well intentioned, it all ends up costing workers their jobs.

But the new study, conducted by Ken Jacobs and Dave Graham-Squire at the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education and Stephanie Luce at CUNY's Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, suggests that low-wage employers could pay their workers a wage that would afford them a dignified existence without threatening their profitability.

Paying a fair wage would only result in a price hike of around 1 percent for Walmart shoppers. The researchers note that the increase would be "well below Walmart's estimated savings to consumers" – in other words, the big-box retailer could continue to offer "low prices" without impoverishing their workers. The study's authors noted that the 1 percent price hike was the "most extreme estimate, as portions of the raise could be absorbed through other mechanisms, including increased productivity or lower profit margins."

While it would have a very minor impact on shoppers, it would have a profound effect on the economic security of Wal-Mart's workforce. More than 40 percent of the additional income would go to the working poor. "These poor and low-income workers could expect to earn an additional $1,670 to $6,500 a year in income for each Walmart employee in the family, before taxes," write the authors. Meanwhile, while Walmart's customers are not exactly rich, those "who spend the most at the store are somewhat less likely to come from poor and low-income families." As a result, only 28 percent of the additional costs would be paid by the poor and the near-poor.

Walmart and other low-wage employers are poster-children for free-market hypocrisy, claiming that the "market" dictates they pay poverty wages while shifting some of their labor costs onto the taxpayer. A 2004 study by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated that just one Walmart store with 200 "associates" costs taxpayers over $420,000 per year in government assistance to the poor.

The study squares with earlier research that found minimum wage increases to have little or no impact on unemployment. According to the Economic Policy Institute, studies have shown that "there is no evidence of job loss from previous minimum wage increases," because "employers may be able to absorb some of the costs of a wage increase through higher productivity, lower recruiting and training costs, decreased absenteeism, and increased worker morale."

Yet the idea that paying a decent wage kills jobs persists, as does the claim, made by the corporate right every single day, that high corporate taxes are driving jobs overseas. As I noted last month, he kernel of truth is that, at 35 percent, we do have one of the highest statutory corporate rates in the world – that is, the rate that's written down in the tax code.

What US companies actually pay in taxes is among the lowest figures in the developed world. As the non-partisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) explained, the 35 percent rate the corporate mouthpieces on CNBC are always whining about "does not take into account the generous depreciation rules, exemptions, deductions, and credits (some of which are sometimes termed 'loopholes') that corporations may be eligible for."

Looking at the big picture, the U.S. ranked 28th out of 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (which includes most of the world's leading economies) in terms of the share of our economic activity that corporations pay in income taxes. At 1.8 percent, our government actually collects around half of the OECD average of 3.4 percent (PDF).

Or consider what Republicans refer to as "job-killing regulations." The costs of protecting human health, workers' safety and the environment is supposedly too onerous to the private sector, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) studied the economic impact of 106 major regulations between 2001 and 2010 and found that they cost the economy between $44 and $62 billion (in 2001 dollars), but yielded far more in economic benefits, adding $136 billion to $651 billion to the U.S. economy (PDF ).

Now consider this: during the 2000s, under President Bush, we had a model of the low-wage, low-tax, lightly regulated economy that conservatives insist businesses require in order to employ people. Bush slashed taxes for corporations and high earners, cut rates on investment income, threatened to veto (or did veto) nine minimum wage increases and had a dismal record of regulating corporate activities.

That climate did lead to robust job growth by big U.S.-based multinationals, but not in this country. According to Commerce Department data cited by the Wall Street Journal, big "companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million." How did that performance stack up against the Clinton years, with slightly higher taxes on wealth and modestly stronger corporate regulation? The Journal notes that the last decade saw "a big switch from the 1990s, when [big business] added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad."

It's not that companies don't seek more "business-friendly" climes where there is less regulation and wages are lower. It's that the process has been facilitated by trade agreements allowing multinationals to offshore production for our domestic market without any barriers whatsoever. As economist Dean Baker put it, "we carefully structured these trade agreements -- we put great effort into it -- to put our manufacturing workers into competition with manufacturing workers in developing nations."

That meant going to these places and asking: What kind of problems does General Motors face if they want to set up a manufacturing plant in Mexico or Malaysia or China? What can we do to make it as easy as possible? That means that they know they can set up their factory and not have it nationalized, not have restrictions on repatriating profits, etc. Then they need to be able to import the goods back into the United States, and that means not only making sure there are no tariffs or quotas, but also that there's no safety or environmental restrictions that might keep the goods out.

And big, multinational companies are increasingly investing in overseas operations because the middle class in this country is being squeezed so hard – and consumer demand is so deep in the trough – that foreign shores are where the customers are. They've come a long way from Henry Ford's novel idea of paying his workers enough to afford to buy the products they were making.

 
Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

America Needs a Better Ruling Class: E.J. Dionne ANS

The "ruling class" has changed.  They used to be just greedy and self-important, but now they are sociopaths, without any concept that killing the goose that laid the golden egg could be to their own detriment too.  Idiots. 
this article says that nicer than I did. 
Find it here:  http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=10455 
--Kim


America Needs a Better Ruling Class: E.J. Dionne

This piece was called to my attention by Dennis Atwood.

*****************

Needed: A Better Ruling Class

By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

Washington Post, April 17, 2011

The American ruling class is failing us­and itself.

At other moments in our history, the informal networks of the wealthy and powerful who often wield at least as much influence as our elected politicians accepted that their good fortune imposed an obligation: to reform and thus preserve the system that allowed them to do so well. They advocated social decency out of self-interest (reasonably fair societies are more stable) but also from an old-fashioned sense of civic duty. "Noblesse oblige" sounds bad until it doesn't exist anymore.

An enlightened ruling class understands that it can get richer and its riches will be more secure if prosperity is broadly shared, if government is investing in productive projects that lift the whole society, and if social mobility allows some circulation of the elites. A ruling class closed to new talent doesn't remain a ruling class for long.

But a funny thing happened to the American ruling class: It stopped being concerned with the health of society as a whole and became almost entirely obsessed with money.

Oh yes, there are bighearted rich people when it comes to private charity. Heck, David Koch, the now famous libertarian-conservative donor, has been extremely generous to the arts, notably to New York's Lincoln Center.

Yet when it comes to governing, the ruling class now devotes itself in large part to utterly self-involved lobbying. Its main passion has been to slash taxation on the wealthy, particularly on the financial class that has gained the most over the last 20 years. By winning much lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends, it's done a heck of a job.

Listen to David Cay Johnston, the author of "Free Lunch" and a columnist for Tax Notes. "The effective rate for the top 400 taxpayers has gone from 30 cents on the dollar in 1993 to 22 cents at the end of the Clinton years to 16.6 cents under Bush," he said in a telephone interview. "So their effective rate has gone down more than 40 percent."

He added: "The overarching drive right now is to push the burden of government, of taxes, down the income ladder."

And you wonder where the deficit came from.

If the ruling class were as worried about the deficit as it claims to be, it would accept that the wealthiest people in society have a duty to pony up more for the very government whose police power and military protect them, their property and their wealth.

The influence of the ruling class comes from its position in the economy and its ability to pay for the politicians' campaigns. There are not a lot of working-class people at those fundraisers President Barack Obama has been attending lately. And I'd underscore that I am not using the term to argue for a Marxist economy. We need the market. We need incentives. We don't need our current levels of inequality.
Those at the top of the heap are falling far short of the standards set by American ruling classes of the past. As John Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic, put it in his indispensable 2000 book "The Paradox of American Democracy," the American establishment has at crucial moments had "an understanding that individual happiness is inextricably linked to social well-being." What's most striking now, by contrast, is "the irresponsibility of the nation's elites."
Those elites will have no moral standing to argue for higher taxes on middle-income people or cuts in government programs until they acknowledge how much wealthier they have become than the rest of us and how much pressure they have brought over the years to cut their own taxes. Resolving the deficit problem requires the very rich to recognize their obligation to contribute more to a government that, measured against other wealthy nations, is neither investing enough in the future nor doing a very good job of improving the lives and opportunities of the less affluent.

"A blind and ignorant resistance to every effort for the reform of abuses and for the readjustment of society to modern industrial conditions represents not true conservatism, but an incitement to the wildest radicalism." With those words in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt showed he understood what a responsible ruling class needed to do. Where are those who would now take up his banner?

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 3:30 pmand is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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One Response to "America Needs a Better Ruling Class: E.J. Dionne"

  1. Richard H. Randall Says:
  2. April 21st, 2011 at 4:17 pm
  3. The Kennedys: Joe, killed while serving in the US Army-Air Corps, WWII
  4. John, veteran of the US Navy, WWII, killed by assasins, 1963
  5. Robert, served in US Merchant Marine, murdered as he camp
  6. paigned for President, 1968
  7. Ted, died of cancer while serving in the US Senate.

A Constructive Primary Challenge to President Obama ANS

This seems like a really good idea.  What do you think?  Could it work?  Is there a good person to do it?  Would it re-energize the people who are disappointed in Obama?
Find it here:  http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=10462&cpage=1#comment-482761
--Kim


* A Constructive Primary Challenge to President Obama

Here are my premises:

1) Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2012, regardless of whether or not any Democrat would challenge him.

2) Re-electing Barack Obama is an important goal for the 2012 elections, because the election of the Republican nominee is almost certain to be considerably worse, and therefore nothing should be done in a primary challenge that would weaken Obama for the general election (as for example, Ted Kennedy's challenge in 1980 weakened Jimmy Carter).

3) President Obama's leadership has been sorely lacking in some essential ingredients –see "Let's Talk About THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM!"– and it is not a happy prospect that we will get no better leadership between now and January, 2017.

Therefore:

4) If there could be a primary challenge that provoked Obama to be a stronger leader without weakening him, that would be desirable.

To that end, I propose a that a well-chosen challenger come forward and declare his candidacy in the following terms:

"I am entering the race for the Democratic nomination for president in 2012 not to weaken Barack Obama but to strengthen him. We who turned to Obama for leadership in 2008 have watched him give away too much of his hard-won power by being too reluctant to stand and fight against this radical force that has taken over the Republican Party.

[This point can be elaborated as needed.]

"I know that I speak for millions of Americans in saying to this president, 'We need you to stand and fight.' And that is what my candidacy is intended to provide: a means for those Americans to send President Obama that message.

"So vote for me to send that message to the President. We need you to stop reaching out to the people who have declared themselves your enemies, and who neither speak nor act in good faith. We need you to expose and defeat the unAmerican ways of these Republicans who from the beginning have made your failure –not the nation's success– their paramount goal.

"We need you to help the American people to see this destructive force that's taken over the Republican Party for what it is, so that they will repudiate it. We need for you to stand and defend more vigorously the kind of values you proclaimed in your campaign to become president.

"We need you to use your bully pulpit to help the American people see the stark choices we face, between the ways of the Republicans –government of the people, for the few rich and powerful– and the values of the Democratic Party whose champion we chose you to be.

"And for all that, we need for you to stop avoiding the confrontations these Republicans keep pressing upon you, and instead to stand and fight.

"That's what a vote for me will mean in this primary season. I offer my candidacy as a means for the millions of Americans who elected you president to send you the message: we need you to be the strong leader, the transformational president, that you promised us you'd be."

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 8:32 pmand is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

 Responses to "* A Constructive Primary Challenge to President Obama"

  1. kim Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
  2. April 22nd, 2011 at 11:33 am
  3. Wow! Would it work? And who could do this? Bernie Sanders? You? Kucinich? Oh, I know: Alan Grayson!
  4. Anybody have his email so we can send this to him?

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More ANS


this is about why things are more expensive if you are poor.  It's long, but a good, if painful to read, article.
Find it here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/17/AR2009051702053.html?sid=ST2009051801162  
--Kim








The High Cost of Poverty: Why the Poor Pay More

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By DeNeen L. Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 18, 2009

You have to be rich to be poor.

That's what some people who have never lived below the poverty line don't understand.
This Story
Put it another way: The poorer you are, the more things cost. More in money, time, hassle, exhaustion, menace. This is a fact of life that reality television and magazines don't often explain.

So we'll explain it here. Consider this a primer on the economics of poverty.

"The poor pay more for a gallon of milk; they pay more on a capital basis for inferior housing," says Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.). "The poor and 100 million who are struggling for the middle class actually end up paying more for transportation, for housing, for health care, for mortgages. They get steered to subprime lending. . . . The poor pay more for things middle-class America takes for granted."

Poverty 101: We'll start with the basics.

Like food: You don't have a car to get to a supermarket, much less to Costco or Trader Joe's, where the middle class goes to save money. You don't have three hours to take the bus. So you buy groceries at the corner store, where a gallon of milk costs an extra dollar.

A loaf of bread there costs you $2.99 for white. For wheat, it's $3.79. The clerk behind the counter tells you the gallon of leaking milk in the bottom of the back cooler is $4.99. She holds up four fingers to clarify. The milk is beneath the shelf that holds beef bologna for $3.79. A pound of butter sells for $4.49. In the back of the store are fruits and vegetables. The green peppers are shriveled, the bananas are more brown than yellow, the oranges are picked over.
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(At a Safeway on Bradley Boulevard in Bethesda, the wheat bread costs $1.19, and white bread is on sale for $1. A gallon of milk costs $3.49 -- $2.99 if you buy two gallons. A pound of butter is $2.49. Beef bologna is on sale, two packages for $5.)

Prices in urban corner stores are almost always higher, economists say. And sometimes, prices in supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods are higher. Many of these stores charge more because the cost of doing business in some neighborhoods is higher. "First, they are probably paying more on goods because they don't get the low wholesale price that bigger stores get," says Bradley R. Schiller, a professor emeritus at American University and the author of "The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination."

"The real estate is higher. The fact that volume is low means fewer sales per worker. They make fewer dollars of revenue per square foot of space. They don't end up making more money. Every corner grocery store wishes they had profits their customers think they have."

According to the Census Bureau, more than 37 million people in the country live below the poverty line. The poor know these facts of life. These facts become their lives.


Time is money, they say, and the poor pay more in time, too.
This Story
When you are poor, you don't have the luxury of throwing a load into the washing machine and then taking your morning jog while it cycles. You wait until Monday afternoon, when the laundromat is most likely to be empty, and you put all of that laundry from four kids into four heaps, bundle it in sheets, load a cart and drag it to the corner.

"If I had my choice, I would have a washer and a dryer," says Nya Oti, 37, a food-service worker who lives in Brightwood. She stands on her toes to reach the top of a washer in the laundromat on Georgia Avenue NW and pours in detergent. The four loads of laundry will take her about two hours. A soap opera is playing loudly on the television hanging from the ceiling. A man comes in talking to himself. He drags his loads of dirty sheets and mattress pads and dumps them one by one into the machines next to Oti.

She does not seem to notice. She is talking about other costs of poverty. "My car broke down this weekend, and it took a lot of time getting on the bus, standing on the bus stop. It was a waste of a whole lot of times. Waiting. The transfer to the different bus."

When she has her car, she drives to Maryland, where she shops for her groceries at Shoppers Food Warehouse or Save-A-Lot, where she says some items are cheaper and some are higher. "They have a way of getting you in there on a bargain. You go in for something cheap, but something else is more expensive." She buys bags of oranges or apples, but not the organic kind. "Organic is too much," she says.

"When you are poor, you substitute time for money," says Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "You have to work a lot of hours and still not make a lot of money. You get squeezed, and your money is squeezed."
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The poor pay more in hassle: the calls from the bill collectors, the landlord, the utility company. So they spend money to avoid the hassle. The poor pay for caller identification because it gives them peace of mind to weed out calls from bill collectors.

The rich have direct deposit for their paychecks. The poor have check-cashing and payday loan joints, which cost time and money. Payday advance companies say they are providing an essential service to people who most need them. Their critics say they are preying on people who are the most "economically vulnerable."

"As you've seen with the financial services industry, if people can cut a profit, they do it," Blumenauer says. "The poor pay more for financial services. A lot of people who are 'unbanked' pay $3 for a money order to pay their electric bill. They pay a 2 percent check-cashing fee because they don't have bank services. The reasons? Part of it is lack of education. But part of it is because people target them. There is evidence that credit-card mills have recently started trolling for the poor. They are targeting the recently bankrupt."

Outside the ACE check-cashing office on Georgia Avenue in Petworth, Harrison Blakeney, 67, explains a hard financial lesson of poverty. He uses the check-cashing store to pay his telephone bill. The store charges 10 percent to take Blakeney's money and send the payment to the phone company. That 10 percent becomes what it costs him to get his payment to the telephone company on time. Ten percent is more than the cost of a stamp. But, Blakeney says: "I don't have time to mail it. You come here and get it done. Then you don't get charged with the late fee."

Blakeney, a retired auto mechanic who now lives on a fixed income, says: "We could send the payment ahead of time but sometimes you don't have money ahead of time. That's why you pay extra money to get them to send it."

Blakeney, wearing a purple jacket, leans on his cane. He has no criticism for the check-cashing place. "That's how they make their money," he says. "I don't care about the charge."


Just then, Lenwood Brooks walks out of the check-cashing place. He is angry about how much it just cost him to cash a check. "They charged me $15 to cash a $300 check," he says.
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You ask him why he didn't just go to a bank. But his story is as complicated as the various reasons people find themselves in poverty and in need of a check-cashing joint. He says he lost his driver's license and now his regular bank "won't recognize me as a human. That's why I had to come here. It's a rip-off, but it's like a convenience store. You pay for the convenience."

Then there's credit. The poor don't have it. What they had was a place like First Cash Advance in D.C.'s Manor Park neighborhood, where a neon sign once flashed "PAYDAY ADVANCE." Through the bulletproof glass, a cashier in white eyeliner and long white nails explained what you needed to get an advance on your paycheck -- a pay stub, a legitimate ID, a checkbook. This meant you're doing well enough to have a checking account, but you're still poor.

And if you qualify, the fee for borrowing $300 is $46.50.

That was not for a year -- it's for seven days, although the terms can vary. How much interest will this payday loan cost you? In simple terms, the company is charging a $15.50 fee for every $100 that you borrow. On your $300 payday loan -- borrowed for a term of seven days -- the effective annual percentage rate is 806 percent.

The cashier says that what you do is write First Cash Advance a check for $345.50 plus another $1 fee, and it will give you $300 in cash upfront. It holds the check until you get paid. Then you bring in $346.50 and it returns your check. Or it cashes the check and keeps your $346.50, or you have the option of extending the loan with additional fees. You'll be out $46.50, which you'd rather have for the late fee on the rent you didn't pay on time. Or the gas bill you swear you paid last month but the gas company swears it never got.
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But now the payday advance place has closed, shuttered by metal doors. A sign in the front door says the business has moved. After the D.C. government passed a law requiring payday lenders to abide by a 24-percent limit on the annual percentage rate charged on a loan, many such stores in the District closed. Now advocates for the poor say they are concerned about other businesses that prey on poor people by extending loans in exchange for car titles. If a person does not pay back the loan, then the business becomes the owner of the car.

All these costs can lead the poor to a collective depression. Douglas J. Besharov, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says: "There are social costs of being poor, though it is not clear where the cause and effect is. We know for a fact that on certain measures, people who are poor are often more depressed than people who are not. I don't know if poverty made them depressed or the depression made them poor. I think the cause and effect is an open question. Some people are so depressed they are not functional. 'I live in a crummy neighborhood. My kids go to a crummy school.' That is not the kind of scenario that would make them happy." Another effect of all this, he says: "Would you want to hire someone like that?"

The poor suspect that prices are higher where they live, even the prices in major supermarkets. The suspicions sometimes spill over into frustration.

On a hot spring afternoon, Jacob Carter finds himself standing in a checkout line at the Giant on Alabama Avenue SE. Before the cashier finishes ringing up his items, he puts $43 on the conveyor belt. But his bill comes to $52.07. He has no more money, so he tells the clerk to start removing items.

The clerk suggests that he use his "bonus card" for savings.

Carter tells the clerk he has no such card.


He puts back the liter of soda. Puts back the paper towels. Sets aside $9 worth of hot fried chicken wings. He returns $13 worth of groceries. "Y'all got some high prices in this [expletive]," he says, standing in Aisle 4, blue shirt over work clothes.
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The clerk suggests that he take his cash off the conveyor belt, because if she moves the belt the money will be carried into the machinery. Then the money will be gone.

Carter, a building engineer, snatches up the money, then gives it to the clerk. His final bill is $39.07.

He looks at the receipt and then announces without the slightest indication as to why: "Just give me all my [expletive] money back. It's too high in this [expletive]." The clerk calls the supervisor, who comes over. The supervisor doesn't argue with Carter. She just starts the process of giving him a refund.

"I want my money back. This [expletive] is too high. My grandmother told me about this store."

The supervisor returns $39.07 in cash. "Sir," she says, "have a blessed day."

The food in this supermarket might be cheaper than the goods at a corner store. But Carter still feels frustrated by what he thinks is a mark-up on prices in supermarkets in poor neighborhoods. Carter walks out.

The poor pay in other ways, ways you might never imagine. Jeanette Reed, who is retired and lives on a fixed income, sold her blood when she needed money. "I had no other source to get money," she says. "I went to the blood bank. And they gave me $30.
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"I needed the money. I didn't have the money and no source of getting money. No gas. No food. I have to go to a center that gives out boxes of food once a month. They give you cereal or vouchers for $10. They give you canned tuna and macaroni and cheese. Crackers and soup. They give you commodities like day-old bread."

The poor know the special economics of their housing, too.

"You pay rent that might be more than a mortgage," Reed says. "But you don't have the credit or the down payment to buy a house. Apartments are not going down. They are going up. They say houses are better, cheaper. But how are you going to get in a house if you don't have any money for a down payment?"

There is also an economic cost to living in low-income neighborhoods.


"The cheaper housing is in more-dangerous areas," says Reed, who lives in Southeast Washington. "I moved out of my old apartment. I hate that area. They be walking up and down the street. Couldn't take the dog out at night because strangers walking up and down the street. They will knock on your door. Either they rob you, kill or ask for money. If you're not there, they will steal air conditioners and copper. They will sell your copper [pipes] for money."
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And then there is the particular unpleasantness when you make too much money to fall below the poverty line, but not enough to move up, up and away from it.

For our final guest lecturer on poverty we take you to the Thrift Store on Georgia Avenue and Marie Nicholas, 35, in an orange shirt, purple pants and thick black eyeliner. She is what economists call the working poor.

She is picking through the racks. The store is busy with customers on a Monday afternoon. There is the shrill sound of hangers sliding across racks under fluorescent lights. An old confirmation dress hangs from the ceiling. It has faded to yellow. It's not far from the used silver pumps, size 9 1/2 , nearly new, on sale for $9.99.

"People working who don't make a lot of money go to the system for help, and they deny them," Nicholas says. "They say I make too much. It almost helps if you don't work."

She says she makes $15 an hour working as a certified nursing assistant. She pays $850 for rent for a one-bedroom that she shares with her boyfriend and child. She went looking for a two-bedroom unit recently and found it would cost her $1,400. She pays $300 a month for child care for her 11-year-old son, who is developmentally delayed. She tried to put him in a subsidized child-care facility, but was told she makes too much money. "My son was not chosen for Head Start because I wasn't in a shelter or on welfare. People's kids who do go don't do nothing but sit at home."
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Money and time. "I ride the bus to get to work," Nicholas says. It takes an hour. "If I could drive, it would take me 10 minutes. I have to catch two buses." She gets to the bus stop at 6:30 a.m. The bus is supposed to come every 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes, she says, it comes every 30 minutes.

What could you accomplish with the lost 20 minutes standing there in the rain? Waiting. That's another cost of poverty. You wait in lines. You wait at bus stops. You wait on the bus as it makes it way up Georgia Avenue, hitting every stop. No sense in trying to hurry when you are poor.

When you are poor, you wait.