The free market is anti-American ANS

Here is a good, understandable, article about the real "American economics".  It is NOT "free market" economics.  That's what's un-American.  
Find it here:  http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/8/10/891885/-The-free-market-is-anti-American
--Kim

The free market is anti-American

by Mark Sumner

Sun Aug 15, 2010 at 06:00:02 AM PDT

The pair of words at the top of the conserva-dictionary these days has to be those Bobbsey Twins of political attack: anti-American and un-American.  Michelle Bachman has called on the press to investigate "anti-American" members of Congress. Rand Paul called the president "un-American" for trying to hold BP accountable for the damage to the Gulf region. Oliver North says that President Obama has a "core-philosophy of being anti-American." The appropriately named Dick Morris says that Obama is the "first anti-American president." 

This isn't exactly a new coinage. The un and anti have been pulled out many times to fling against those who have in the past protested some aspect of national policy, especially those who've failed to cheer loudly enough for war.  But these days it's not so much generic hippy punching that brings out the twins. Instead they're generally fired over the bow of anyone the right sees as deviating from the one true path -- that of the unrestrained free market. President Obama is a frequent target because of his many real and imagined slights against the market. After all, while the current president didn't start the bank bailout (even if many Americans think he did), he did support at least mild regulation of Wall Street run wild, and he spent all that money on "shovel ready" infrastructure products even though it meant running up the debt, he did invest in the failing auto industry, and he... um, well, he's done lots of other socialist things too. They're sure of it. Barack Obama has even promoted the kind of America where children give away lemonade (really, that's what's wrong with America -- too much free lemonade).

Conservatives pull out the "anti-American" tag in going after every intrusion of the government into the economy. They leave little doubt that America and the "free market" are synonymous. But here't here's the thing: there is an American eonomic system, and while defining what it is takes a little time, defining what it's not is simple.  It's not the free market.

The American economic system -- the system defined by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton -- came directly out of the challenges faced by our nation. America, as a new country, was at a huge disadvantage to Europe when it came to the ability to produce manufactured goods. American-made goods at the time were often lesser quality, more expensive, or both when compared to products coming from European factories. Both men were well aware of free market principles (On the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776) and there were those among the founders that pushed Washington to run the country along a purely market-driven philosophy. An unregulated free market backed up by the gold standard was the basis of the "English System," and the British had enjoyed more than a little success.

Washington and Hamilton might have emulated the nation they had just defeated on the battlefield, but that wasn't the path they chose. Instead, steep tariffs were imposed on imported goods. These inflated the price of products from European factories and allowed American makers to both capture more of the market and turn a higher profit. With that money, American factories were enlarged and became more numerous.

There was another problem at the time -- states were nearly bankrupt. The cost of financing the War of Independence had emptied the coffers, and many states were having trouble paying off their loans. At the same time, hundreds of state and local banks were operating under different rules, different rates, even different currencies. The country was awash in speculators taking advantage of differences in exchange rates and shipping costs to rack up fortunes while farmers and craftsmen suffered. Think Wall Street was crazy in 2007? Imagine a country with dozens of different currencies and no one regulating the exchange rates. Now imagine how many people learned to game the system.

To address this, Hamilton proposed that the federal government bail-out the states and regulate the financial markets. There was only one problem with this idea -- the federal government was also in debt, and banks were unlikely to loan them money that would be used to regulate those same institutions. Hamilton had an answer for that. He proposed that the US government become the largest stockholder in a bank. Not an existing bank, a new bank. The government would create this bank as a private company, but the government would own the majority of stock. The government would also lay down the rules for the bank, including limits on who could buy stock and what type of investments the bank could make. From this new bank, the government would borrow the money to pay off the states and address federal needs.

The first and largest federal need? The $2 million it would take to buy stock in the new bank. The solution? The new bank loaned it to us. Got that? We made the bank, the bank then loaned us the money to buy the bank. Even paying back the loan was more than we could afford, so Hamilton made a proposal popular with politicians in any age, a "sin tax." In this case, it was a tax on imported and domestic spirits (to see how well that went, just look up the Whiskey Rebellion).

With the money from the new government-owned bank, the US could take care of its own debts and those of the states. The government could regulate currency and set rules on trading. It also started in on a series of large infrastructure projects -- roads, canals, and public buildings.

That, brothers and sisters, was the American economic system. Those who worry that we've wandered too far from the vision of the founding fathers might want to remember that in George Washington's first term, the government was involved in:

• selectively restricting imports
• bailing out debts of states
• being the majority owner of a private company
• clamping down on fiscal speculation
• executing a "stimulus plan" of infrastructure projects

And all of this goodness was paid for by new taxes.

The American school of economics was founded on these ideas: selective tariffs, government regulation of banks, and strong investment in infrastructure. Under later presidents a fourth plank was added to this platform -- investment in public education.

Within a space of decades, the American school of economics gave us... America. America the economic power that matched, then surpassed any of its European rivals. The success of American economics was so clear that Lincoln's economic advisor, could write these words...

Two systems are before the world;... One looks to increasing the necessity of commerce; the other to increasing the power to maintain it. One looks to underworking the Hindoo, and sinking the rest of the world to his level; the other to raising the standard of man throughout the world to our level. One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace.

That other system, the sinking, pauper-ignorance-war making system? That was the English System, the system we now call "the free market."

Of course, the American school of economics was never followed by 100% of Americans. It's fortunes waxed and waned, taking huge hits at the start of the 20th century -- particularly under Woodrow Wilson. These days, we're taught to believe that protectionism was one of the causes of the 1929 stock market crash, but the truth is it was leaving the old system that caused a unsupportable increase in stock prices. Reduction of tariffs, easing of regulation, and the end of the National Bank system moved money away from internal investments and toward international trade and speculation.  The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was signed into being after the crash in an attempt to restore some fragment of the old system. It's not clear what, if any, effect these tariffs had, but under the New Deal funds were diverted from speculation back to infrastructure -- pulling America up from the depression.

These days we're also fed the idea that in this "flat" world, any attempt to return to the American system would be disastrous. We couldn't possibly impose tariffs as post-war Japan did until it was operating at a trade surplus. We couldn't possibly deal that way with our "partners" such as China -- where American automobiles face steep tariffs so steep that their products are uncompetitive unless they partner with Chinese-owned companies. The evidence of the last century is that nations practicing a "free trade" system, always export jobs to countries practicing the American system. But hey, America can't possibly use the American system. It would be... un-American.

The free market system was not the original economic system of America. It wasn't the system that brought us to international power, not the system that carried us through World War II, not written into our Constitution in any way. In fact, one of the primary powers granted federal authority is the regulation of the economy. It was clearly understood that economic anarchy was incompatible with democracy.

In saying that any move against an absolute free market is un-American, conservatives are declaring that Washington was un-American, Hamilton was un-American, Lincoln was un-American.

The truth is that the free market is opposed to the American economic system, but America the country has no predefined economic system. It's not hard-coded that we follow the American system, the free market system, or any other system. One of the goals of the constitution was to give us the flexibility to adapt economic policy to the times. Pretending that we must remain wedded to one system no matter what (even when that system has as long a record of failure as the so-called free market) -- that's really anti-American.

Tax Cuts Are Theft: An Amplification ANS

Here's a short piece from Sara Robinson, with comments.  It's about how to think about the legacy our government represents.
Find it here:  http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010083210/tax-cuts-are-theft-amplification#comment-13011
--Kim


 

an economy for all

Tax Cuts Are Theft: An Amplification

By Sara Robinson

August 10, 2010 - 4:21pm ET

---

more» 

Dave Johnson's post on the broken contract that's allowed private interests to siphon off our public wealth for the past 30 years is incredibly important. His basic argument is this:

We, the People built our democracy and the empowerment and protections it bestows. We built the infrastructure, schools and all of the public structures, laws, courts, monetary system, etc. that enable enterprise to prosper. That prosperity is the bounty of our democracy and by contract it is supposed to be shared and reinvested. That is the contract. Our system enables some people to become wealthy but all of us are supposed to benefit from this system. Why else would We, the People have set up this system, if not for the benefit of We, the People?

Dave points to the practical effects of a piece of conservative theology that deserves a bit of deeper drilling. It's this: Conservatives believe that only private individuals should hold wealth. They do not believe in commonly-held public wealth of any kind. And that's why they feel perfectly free to raid the vast legacy that our ancestors have accumulated and stewarded for us over the past 230 years.

It is a legacy -- the biggest one ever amassed in history, in fact -- and we do need to be thinking about it that way. What they've stolen from us and arbitraged away isn't just our own money; it's the vast accumulation of civilizational wealth that was bought with the blood, sweat, tears, endless sacrifice, earnest planning, and bold dreaming of a dozen generations of American ancestors, and then bequeathed to us to ensure our own futures. Each of those generations received it in trust from the one that came before, added its own unique contributions to it, and then passed it on as an endowment to the next. As time compounded the gift, the legacy got richer; and our sense of who was entitled to share in the bounty got broader. By the time we got our hands on it, the American legacy was, quite simply, the biggest trust fund of physical, social, and cultural capital on earth.

To understand the magnitude of the gift, consider how things work in the great aristocratic houses, both in Europe and the US. If you are a Mountbatten or a Rothschild or a Morgan or a Bush, your clan has a deep well of resources, built up over many centuries of careful investment, that ensures that you will never go without. There's always a family-owned house somewhere to stay in, an income stream to support you, and connections that will open any doors you might want to pass through. There's a villa, chalet, or yacht where you can vacation. There's a fleet of cars standing by to take you wherever you need to go. There are trusted family retainers to advise you on matters of money and law. If you need anything at all, ask around: there's undoubtedly someone in the extended clan who already has it to share, or knows how to get it for you.

It's impossible to underestimate or overstate the lifelong advantages that come with being born into a family like this. At every turn, throughout your life, you'll have every opportunity to make good -- and no excuses not to.

For the first 200 years of our existence, being born American was not unlike being born into the richest, most powerful family on the planet. By the middle of the 20th century, generations of sound investment and careful stewardship had built our collective trust fund to the point where we, too, began to believe that the shame would be on us if any member of our great household ever had to go without. If you needed decent housing or a monthly remittance to get by, we could cover that. If you needed doors opened for you in other countries, we had friends all over the world who were glad to deal with Americans. If you wanted a world-class education or the vacation of a lifetime, no problem: the family ran the best schools and universities in the world, and owned breathtaking national parks for your pleasure. If you needed to get around, we provided safe transportation networks. If you needed advice or help with a plan, there were trusted public servants on retainer. Our attitude toward the proper role of government was that, at our best, America was a big, powerful clan that had a moral duty (however imperfectly and selectively met in practice) to take care of its own, and maximize the opportunties availble to its members.

It's only when you think about our common wealth the way the world's richest families do -- as a bequest from a long line of distinguished ancestors, as a vast common resource base that provides us with extraordinary material comfort today, and as a sacred trust that we must manage and multiply on behalf of generations yet to come -- that you can really begin to understand the sheer magnitude of everything they took from us.

The thieves didn't just steal our houses, our retirement funds, our careers, or our tax money. It went far beyond that. They also stole the family jewels -- the vast infrastructure that's been built up for centuries by generations of foresighted Americans, now collapsing into uselessness. They defunded the great universities, crowded our kids into classrooms like factory farmed chickens, and are shutting down the magnificent state and national parks. And they're also stealing our future, committing us to endless debt, sucking the marrow out of our international standing, foreclosing our opportunties, making it impossible to solve looming problems, and forcing us to hand off to our children a far more meager legacy than the one we received.

They're not just cheating us. They're stealing from all those hardworking generations that sacrificed to bring us here; and all the generations still yet to come, who will be so much poorer because we let them loot us blind.

Here's the irony: the people who did this to us did it precisely because they also understand wealth in these generational terms. In many cases, the thieves were themselves from wealthy families that have operated exactly this same way for a very long time, and who have personally benefitted from the private wealth accumulated by their ancestors. In other cases, they were "self-made" billionaires who may not have wealth in their past, but were determined to capitalize a dynasty in the future.

So, if they understand this, where's the disconnect? Why couldn't they respect the public's need to manage our common wealth the same way they manage their own private wealth?

The disconnect is this: In the conservative worldview, it's right and legitimate for private families and corporations to accrue generational wealth, and build great dynasties. But it's absolutely wrong for the democratic masses to accumulate wealth that way; or to collaborate, via the government, to ensure that all of their children will have a birthright sufficient to open the doors to their dreams.

Maggie Thatcher told us outright: "There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and families, and their interests." And if there's no such thing as society, then society has no right to accumulate wealth -- via taxes, investment, or any other means. Viewed this way, a conservative might even think it's a virtuous thing to defund and defraud the public out of any capital it does manage to acquire.

In the view of these economic royalists, the bottom line is this: it's OK to steal from their American brothers and sisters because they don't really believe that the family is legitimate in the first place. Being bastards -- heirs only to a social contract they insist never existed in the first place -- the rest of us were never entitled to the blessings of a birthright, any more than we're entitled to any other rights, including the right to govern ourselves.

---

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future
COMMENTS

It's just plain greed

By Sanford Silver | August 11, 2010 - 10:49am GMT

The economic aristocrats consider the rest of us to be expendable resources; used as cheaply as possible for as long as doing so is profitable then tossed aside without a second thought.

The social contract, the power of government as an instrument of the individually powerless, the generational wealth that we've created, inherited, expanded and shared among those not wealthy, even shared with the wealthy making their accumulation and maintenance of wealth possible, make us less dependent on, even defiant of, the self-styled "Masters of the Universe".

We even have the audacity to force a conscience on the wealthy, to make them behave as if they actually acknowledge a social responsibility.

This they cannot stand for it might cost them a few pennies on the dollar and a small loss of the control they pathologically require.

And so the rich conducted the most insidious of class warfares, propagandizing the least discerning among us into voting against our own socio-economic interests and into supporting political agendas that the entire of human history has proven to be failures for any but the rich. Even then, in the long run, those policies failed the wealthy, as populations rose up and squashed aristocratic control.

Those so gulled have been so traumatized that even today most of them cannot admit or understand their own responsibility for the condition they find themselves and their neighbors in.

Sanford Silver

This is serious sedition

By Jay Moor | August 11, 2010 - 6:56pm GMT

Again, thank you, Sara. You are trying very hard to lend a new perspective to the American concept of "public." In this piece, you have reoriented the definition, looking at it in terms of family and clan, something fans of dynastic rule can relate to. For these ever-fearful and greedy people, security comes from autocratic rule and ruthless, centralized control of resources, used for their own aggrandizement.

That's been the general history of the world, until some very thoughtful people broke the pattern and gave us a democratic republic and the biggest self-governing club ever, redefining security in terms of what we can do cooperatively for each other. This successful club has turned out to be the most powerful aggregator of resources and, consequently, the greatest threat to the old order in its quest for those same resources. So, the history of the USA has been one of the old order -- made up of dynasties, oligarchs and their corporations -- trying to take advantage of the weaknesses in our form of governance to destroy it from within and to break the people's ability to protect its collective legacy.

Corrupting the processes of democratic governance is the current strategy aimed at breaking up the monolith of patriotic cooperation. The attack is on all fronts from the semantic to the violent. Tactics include taking over administrative functions in order to weaken our hold on the collective wealth and taking over one or both of the political parties in order to mount nasty campaigns aimed at governmental self-destruction.

I'm thinking that if we can call a simple little police action a "war on terror," it would be much nearer the truth to rename this internal effort to bring the house down by calling it what it is, "sedition" rather than just "theft." Just as the Civil War continues to be fought, Thomas Jefferson and the boys are still up against the ghost of King George and his corporations. Progressives must accurately identify the threat and mount an effective defense, on all fronts.

Not sedition at all

By Scott Amos | August 11, 2010 - 10:44pm GMT

Many companies are holding off on hiring for a variety of reasons, and here is one of them: They're not optimistic about what is going to happen to taxes overall. The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in just a few months, and several changes (Obamacare, in particular) are getting to ready to nickle-and-dime both individuals and companies.

If you tax too heavily, then you put a serious damper on the creation of jobs...and income...and tax revenues. It's a little tricky to try and get the optimum rates so that you maximize both jobs and tax revenues. But demonizing the desire to keep taxes low by continously calling that thievery is just plain nuts.

Spare me

By Sara Robinson | August 12, 2010 - 3:34pm GMT

the indictments of Obamacare.

We're moving back to the US for the next couple of years, for family reasons. Getting health insurance was our biggest worry. Like most people over 45, both my husband and I have pre-existing conditions that make us basically uninsurable, and we were getting quotes for the three of us (plus son) that were upwards of $2K a month.

Enter Obamacare. We qualify for the national high-risk pool that starts next month, which caps our monthly costs at just over $900 a month. This option will save us about $12K a year, which will enable us to afford to return. And believe me: the government will be getting that back, and then some, when we start paying US income taxes again.

On a larger scale, "high taxes stall job creation" is a piece of free-market fundamentalist cant that's been totally disproven by our past 30 years of experience. In the 50s and 60s, when tax rates were at their highest, the US also saw its highest employment rates. We've been cutting taxes on the rich since the early 80s -- and jobs have been evaporating with every cut. It doesn't work. Even John McCain's campaign budget advisor, Mark Zandi, will tell you it doesn't work.

You will find no hearing for this nonsense here. This is nothing more than a quaint conservative superstition that's clung to obsessively by the True Believers, even in the face of massive evidence that it's simply not true.

It doesn't work that way

By Kim Cooper | August 16, 2010 - 10:10pm GMT

Scott -- You said, "If you tax too heavily, then you put a serious damper on the creation of jobs...and income...and tax revenues. "
How much tax is "too heavily"? As Sara said, when the rich were taxed at 90%, we were at our top for jobs, employment, real income, and tax revenues.
Each time the taxes are cut, the job situation gets worse. How many times does that have to happen until you admit that it doesn't work? When we raise taxes on the rich, they create jobs. "Common sense" is often wrong. Just because it sounds logical that running a government like a household budget SHOULD work, doesn't mean that it DOES work. It doesn't. Governments are different. There are logical explanations for this, it's just more complex than "common sense".

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A Victim Treats His Mugger Right ANS

does this remind you of something in the bible about "him that taketh away they cloak, give him thy coat also"? (Luke 6:29)
I just thought it was interesting in that it had a good outcome. 
Find it here:   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89164759&ps=cprs
--Kim

A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

March 28, 2008

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

"He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, 'Here you go,'" Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim, "like what's going on here?" Diaz says. "He asked me, 'Why are you doing this?'"

Diaz replied: "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.

"You know, I just felt maybe he really needs help," Diaz says.

Diaz says he and the teen went into the diner and sat in a booth.

"The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi," Diaz says. "The kid was like, 'You know everybody here. Do you own this place?'"

"No, I just eat here a lot," Diaz says he told the teen. "He says, 'But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yea, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. "He just had almost a sad face," Diaz says.

The teen couldn't answer Diaz ­ or he didn't want to.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

The teen "didn't even think about it" and returned the wallet, Diaz says. "I gave him $20 ... I figure maybe it'll help him. I don't know."

Diaz says he asked for something in return ­ the teen's knife ­ "and he gave it to me."

Afterward, when Diaz told his mother what happened, she said, "You're the type of kid that if someone asked you for the time, you gave them your watch."

"I figure, you know, if you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It's as simple as it gets in this complicated world."

Produced for Morning Edition by Michael Garofalo

5 States Getting Electric Car Charging Stations ANS

Here's one of many articles about the new generation of electric cars due out very soon.  It just gives one little snapshot of what's happening. 
--Kim


 
Find it here:

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/ecotality-electric-car-charging-stations-460810

5 States Getting Electric Car Charging Stations

ECOTality ramps up the EV Project, in anticipation of demand.

By Seth Leitman
 

nissan leaf

Nissan

We've written a number of times about the race to build out charging infrastructure for electric cars. There have been significant developments in Iceland, Norway, Israel, Japan, and elsewhere. Here in the U.S., one of the leading companies, um, "taking charge," is Arizona-based ECOtality.

Through ECOtality's EV Project, the company is working to build out home-base, commercial and public electric car chargers, starting in major markets in five states: Arizona (Phoenix & Tucson metropolitan areas), Washington (Seattle area), Oregon (Portland, Salem, Corvallis and Eugene), California (San Diego) and Tennessee. The EV Project was created in August 2009, and was awarded a federal stimulus grant of nearly $100 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). That grant is being matched by partners, which include the Nissan LEAF electric car (which just got an estimated sale price, after tax breaks, of roughly $25,000).

With permission from LEAF owners, the EV Project will collect and analyze user data to better improve its EV charging infrastructure. ECOtality hopes that the lessons learned will facilitate better deployment of electric vehicles in the domestic and global markets.

If you live in one of the test regions, you may consider inquiring with ECOtality, or stop by your local Nissan dealer. If not, rest assured, you still may have more electric car charging options in the near future. It's a fast-growing industry, and an exciting time.

--This is a guest post by Seth Leitman, editor of the TAB Green Guru Guides and author of Build Your Own Electric Vehicle, 2nd Edition and Build Your Own Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle.

Also from Seth Leitman:

• DIY Home Energy Audits
• Meet Leilani Munter, the Gorgeous Green Race Car Driver
• Why Parks Make $ense

http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/ecotality-electric-car-charging-stations-460810

Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees ANS corrected

this is about a "green" business that's doing well.  Nice. 
Find it here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/business/energy-environment/08sustain.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all
--Kim


Advertise on NYTimes.com

Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees

 
Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Seth Meyer, left, and John Wells started a green business that makes custom furniture from trees that fall to development, disease or storms. More Photos »

By LAWRENCE W. CHEEK


Published: August 7, 2010

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

At work on a table at Meyer Wells. More Photos »
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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

A 30-foot chef's table was built from an elm tree that fell in a Seattle park. More Photos »

THE wooden kitchen bar in the suburban home of Richard and Donna Majer has a canyonlike crack ripping right down its middle, which is exactly what the couple cherish most about it. It's not just furniture ­ it's a story, complete with a moral.

"As I spend time with it, I see the beauty of the hard life the tree had," Mrs. Majer says. "And it helps me find the beauty in my own life's scars."

The crack occurred three years ago in a storm that mortally wounded the towering oak in the Majers's backyard. It was a family member; Mr. Majer had planted it with his father 53 years earlier. Devastated, the Majers consulted an arborist, who said yes, it had to come down, but that there were a couple of guys in Seattle they should talk to.

The guys were Seth Meyer and John Wells. The pair harvest local urban trees doomed by development, disease or storm damage, and turn them into custom furniture, each piece a distinct botanical narrative.

Their business, started four years ago, bears all the markers that would seem to point toward collapse and extinction in a recessionary economy. It's founded on idealism and emotion. It's riddled with huge and unavoidable inefficiencies. And it tenders a high-end product that asks buyers to take risks and have faith.

Yet the company, Meyer Wells, has thrived. It's been profitable from the start, Mr. Wells says, and revenue has grown annually; it reached $850,000 last year, and the business partners say they're on track to top $1 million this year. There are now nine employees, and the furniture commissions have blown well beyond suburban kitchens to high-visibility clients like Starbucks and the University of Washington.

"I think our idealism is meeting with the demand to make buildings greener," Mr. Wells says.

Michael Verchot, director of the Business and Economic Development Center at the University of Washington, says his research backs up that theory. "We've conducted two small-business surveys in Washington State in the past four months, and we're seeing that companies that have a green product are the ones that are increasing sales," he says. "I can't speak to the whole country, but our surveys here are telling us that green will be here forever. It's a permanent shift."

The Northwest has become one of the strongest markets for nurturing innovative, sustainable businesses, says Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research group here. "In the mental geography of the American mind, the Northwest stands for nature," he says. "It attracts and retains folks who have a strong affinity for our natural heritage."

A heart of green is no guarantee of success, of course, even in Seattle. Such enterprises can be as fleeting as ripples on a pond ­ and Mr. Durning says they often fail for the same reasons others do: they race too far ahead of the market or fail to control costs. It's especially challenging for green businesses to figure out what environmental values consumers want, and what they will pay extra for, he says.

Janet Pomeroy, board president of the San Francisco-based Green Chamber of Commerce, says the green businesses that do well nationally are those that have an authentic story to sell.

Meyer Wells had those elements from the start. It understood Seattle's environmental gestalt, and had a product that could spin its own story. Although custom furniture builders are as abundant as mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest, Meyer Wells staked out a distinct territory: the big slab, furniture that could bring indoors the raw power of the environment rather than a builder's vision.

Mr. Wells says the company also saw trajectories in culture and business worldwide ­ particularly the locavore and slow-food movements ­ that suggested the time was ripe for their venture. "We're starting a slow-wood movement," he says.

In line with typically idealistic sustainable businesses, they're trying the whole bouillabaisse of green values, from using nontoxic, water-based wood finishes to offering better-than-average employee benefits. "For a small company, they work hard to make us comfortable," says Keiku Toutonghi, its one-woman finishing operation. "This is the first place I've gotten health benefits and paid vacations."

Its business model does not depend on tree lovers' anguished calls, but increasingly on networks with other businesses and design professionals. Tutta Bella, a high-end pizzeria chain, asked Meyer Wells to build a 30-foot-long chef's table from a century-old city park elm that had split in a windstorm. The table helps the restaurant establish its brand, the owner, Joe Fugere, says. "It fits our culture of sustainability and authenticity," he says.

Despite the increasingly ambitious restaurant and boardroom tables ­ the latter ironically encrusted with electronic connectivity under the rustic slabs ­ Mr. Meyer and Mr. Wells seem not to have snipped the emotional roots that led them into the business: a love of raw wood. Mr. Majer recalls the day Mr. Meyer came out to assess their doomed oak. "It's hard to explain," he says, "but we knew that Seth could see the soul of that tree."

MEYER WELLS works out of an 8,000-square-foot, high-ceiling building four miles north of downtown that once housed a Navy swimming pool.

Soft northern light floods in through clerestory windows; bare cedar boughs hang from the open ceiling trusses to cleanse any lingering negative energy from the lumber that enters and the furniture that leaves ­ a Native American belief that Mr. Wells embraces. A stunning indoor alley is formed by towering slabs of hardwoods the partners have salvaged: oak, walnut, black locust, bigleaf and silver maples, cherry and madrona.

"People who buy furniture here are adventurers," says Mr. Meyer. "They see the tree and get to be part of the process. They have to have an adventurous spirit, they have to be patient, and they have to trust. There's an element of risk."

Those adventurers might be surprised to learn that Mr. Meyer, 40, is a high-school dropout. He radiates a discerning obsession with the details of design and the philosophy of craftsmanship. "Some people drop out of school because they can't cut it," says Mr. Wells. "Others drop out because school doesn't cut it for them. That's Seth."

Mr. Meyer says he grew up in a house "with a lot of aesthetic awareness."

"My stepfather was a furniture maker," he adds. "There was always a lot of discussion about beauty and craft." Everything in the built environment was up for critique. "We'd be driving along and someone would say: 'Look at the back end of that car. What a missed opportunity!' "

Mr. Wells is 45, coolly cerebral and stuffed with education. Mr. Meyer describes him as the optimistic force in the partnership, the one who argues for the new tool or venture and sustains the faith that it all will work out. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the College of Wooster in Ohio, and another in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design. His résumé is also flocked with sawdust. In high school he made a Chippendale desk that scored second in a statewide shop-class competition in North Carolina.

Like Mr. Meyer, he once ran a one-man custom furniture shop. The two met at a mutual friend's dinner party, worked on a couple of projects together, then decided to form a new company.

Now in production is a large dining table from two storm-felled red elms. At this point, the slabs are propped against a wall, notes and lines chalked on them. A notation beside a two-foot-long crack specifies, "OPEN." The crack will be cleaned up and stabilized, but not filled or hidden. "I see a bird in it, maybe a heron," Mr. Meyer says, admiring its form. The slabs will be mated not with ruler-straight joints, but with painstakingly curved cuts in line with the grain patterns.

He suddenly becomes a tour guide to a whole geography embedded in the wood ­ "islands" and "cathedrals" in the grain. "I'm looking to see how the grain of one board flows into the next so that the composition feels harmonious," he says. "In every piece, I'm looking for some kind of rhythm and balance. It's an intuitive process, not something with a set of rules I could ever write down."

If there's one rule in the shop, it's this: Respect the tree's narrative ­ including the chapters about its hard urban life. Mr. Meyer once found a steel snippet embedded in a beautiful cherry slab, perhaps a remnant of a nail used to hammer a "lost cat" sign to the tree. He left it in place, a piece of the story.

Nearly all of their pieces feature the trendy "live edge" ­ an edge of the slab left unmilled to celebrate the topography of the tree trunk. The technique today can be accused of being a cliché, but nature still provides a universe of forms and textures to admire. Some edges seem to ripple with geologic strata; some display miniature badlands of canyons and ridges. The Meyer Wells philosophy is to impose as little human design as possible.

The timber rolls in through motley channels. Some local arborists are plugged in and know when to call. One day, Mr. Meyer was driving near a Seattle lot that was to be the site of a new apartment building. A sprawling bigleaf maple arrested him.

"I had to make several calls, but I finally got to the demolition contractor," Mr. Meyer recalls. "He said, 'Oh yeah, we're just going to take it to the dump.' " As usual, Meyer Wells took the timber for nothing, but the cost of trucking it to the company's yard is typically $500 for an urban tree salvage.

Although the designs are minimalist, the costs add up ­ for drying, milling, design, joining the component pieces and finishing. Coffee and dining tables mostly range from $3,000 to $10,000, while runwaylike conference tables can easily hit $20,000.

Mr. Wells says they essentially use a cost-plus pricing model, but because each piece ­ and each tree's constellation of problems ­ is different, "sometimes we do well at the pricing, and sometimes we don't."

"But it all seems to average out," he adds, "and we're getting better at it."

Where Mr. Meyer still loves to ponder the expressive possibilities of a crack in a slab, Mr. Wells now seems propelled more by the big-ticket issue of sustainability. "I really believe a designer can make better choices, and that can influence people and move us in a direction that's more sustainable," he says. "That's what I've chosen to do, and I think it's what's made us a successful business."

SUSTAINABLE furniture isn't recession-proof. The company's residential business shrank in the last two years, but increases in corporate commissions more than made up the difference, Mr. Wells said. Now the residential orders are wrenching back up, and Mr. Wells remains a dogged optimist.

"People buy what they believe is right for them to buy," he says. "If there are options available that fit better with their values, they will buy those options."

The business's current challenge is in remaining faithful to its roots. Ms. Pomeroy of the Green Chamber of Commerce notes that one of the universal hazards for green businesses is trying too hard to uphold all their ideals while the gritty realities of everyday economics gnaw away at them. Sometimes, she says, they fail to understand that fully incorporating their values would mean changing the world's economic systems.

In fact, Meyer Wells is trying to save increasingly large chunks of the world. Early this year, it started a subsidiary venture, Green Tree Mill, that will extend its reach into Puget Sound's surrounding forests, harvesting and milling trees that the larger sawmills don't want. Instead of being turned directly into custom furniture, this lumber will be marketed directly to builders.

"I have sleepless nights," Mr. Wells acknowledges. "The mill is pushing us to a new level of risk, with a potentially higher level of reward."

Mr. Meyer seems to crave equilibrium more than growth, and longs for more time to put his hands on a fallen tree and massage its natural beauty.

"We're faced with the not unsatisfying challenge of injecting efficiency into an essentially creative process," he says. "From the classic viewpoint of American business, it's probably a fool's errand. But hey, so far we're making it work."

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2010, on page BU1 of the New York edition.

Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees ANS

this is about a "green" business that's doing well.  Nice. 
Find it here: 
--Kim


Advertise on NYTimes.com

Finding New Life (and Profit) in Doomed Trees

 
Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Seth Meyer, left, and John Wells started a green business that makes custom furniture from trees that fall to development, disease or storms. More Photos »

By LAWRENCE W. CHEEK


Published: August 7, 2010

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New Life for Doomed Trees

 

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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

At work on a table at Meyer Wells. More Photos »
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Stuart Isett for The New York Times

A 30-foot chef's table was built from an elm tree that fell in a Seattle park. More Photos »

THE wooden kitchen bar in the suburban home of Richard and Donna Majer has a canyonlike crack ripping right down its middle, which is exactly what the couple cherish most about it. It's not just furniture ­ it's a story, complete with a moral.

"As I spend time with it, I see the beauty of the hard life the tree had," Mrs. Majer says. "And it helps me find the beauty in my own life's scars."

The crack occurred three years ago in a storm that mortally wounded the towering oak in the Majers's backyard. It was a family member; Mr. Majer had planted it with his father 53 years earlier. Devastated, the Majers consulted an arborist, who said yes, it had to come down, but that there were a couple of guys in Seattle they should talk to.

The guys were Seth Meyer and John Wells. The pair harvest local urban trees doomed by development, disease or storm damage, and turn them into custom furniture, each piece a distinct botanical narrative.

Their business, started four years ago, bears all the markers that would seem to point toward collapse and extinction in a recessionary economy. It's founded on idealism and emotion. It's riddled with huge and unavoidable inefficiencies. And it tenders a high-end product that asks buyers to take risks and have faith.

Yet the company, Meyer Wells, has thrived. It's been profitable from the start, Mr. Wells says, and revenue has grown annually; it reached $850,000 last year, and the business partners say they're on track to top $1 million this year. There are now nine employees, and the furniture commissions have blown well beyond suburban kitchens to high-visibility clients like Starbucks and the University of Washington.

"I think our idealism is meeting with the demand to make buildings greener," Mr. Wells says.

Michael Verchot, director of the Business and Economic Development Center at the University of Washington, says his research backs up that theory. "We've conducted two small-business surveys in Washington State in the past four months, and we're seeing that companies that have a green product are the ones that are increasing sales," he says. "I can't speak to the whole country, but our surveys here are telling us that green will be here forever. It's a permanent shift."

The Northwest has become one of the strongest markets for nurturing innovative, sustainable businesses, says Alan Durning, executive director of the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit research group here. "In the mental geography of the American mind, the Northwest stands for nature," he says. "It attracts and retains folks who have a strong affinity for our natural heritage."

A heart of green is no guarantee of success, of course, even in Seattle. Such enterprises can be as fleeting as ripples on a pond ­ and Mr. Durning says they often fail for the same reasons others do: they race too far ahead of the market or fail to control costs. It's especially challenging for green businesses to figure out what environmental values consumers want, and what they will pay extra for, he says.

Janet Pomeroy, board president of the San Francisco-based Green Chamber of Commerce, says the green businesses that do well nationally are those that have an authentic story to sell.

Meyer Wells had those elements from the start. It understood Seattle's environmental gestalt, and had a product that could spin its own story. Although custom furniture builders are as abundant as mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest, Meyer Wells staked out a distinct territory: the big slab, furniture that could bring indoors the raw power of the environment rather than a builder's vision.

Mr. Wells says the company also saw trajectories in culture and business worldwide ­ particularly the locavore and slow-food movements ­ that suggested the time was ripe for their venture. "We're starting a slow-wood movement," he says.

In line with typically idealistic sustainable businesses, they're trying the whole bouillabaisse of green values, from using nontoxic, water-based wood finishes to offering better-than-average employee benefits. "For a small company, they work hard to make us comfortable," says Keiku Toutonghi, its one-woman finishing operation. "This is the first place I've gotten health benefits and paid vacations."

Its business model does not depend on tree lovers' anguished calls, but increasingly on networks with other businesses and design professionals. Tutta Bella, a high-end pizzeria chain, asked Meyer Wells to build a 30-foot-long chef's table from a century-old city park elm that had split in a windstorm. The table helps the restaurant establish its brand, the owner, Joe Fugere, says. "It fits our culture of sustainability and authenticity," he says.

Despite the increasingly ambitious restaurant and boardroom tables ­ the latter ironically encrusted with electronic connectivity under the rustic slabs ­ Mr. Meyer and Mr. Wells seem not to have snipped the emotional roots that led them into the business: a love of raw wood. Mr. Majer recalls the day Mr. Meyer came out to assess their doomed oak. "It's hard to explain," he says, "but we knew that Seth could see the soul of that tree."

MEYER WELLS works out of an 8,000-square-foot, high-ceiling building four miles north of downtown that once housed a Navy swimming pool.

Soft northern light floods in through clerestory windows; bare cedar boughs hang from the open ceiling trusses to cleanse any lingering negative energy from the lumber that enters and the furniture that leaves ­ a Native American belief that Mr. Wells embraces. A stunning indoor alley is formed by towering slabs of hardwoods the partners have salvaged: oak, walnut, black locust, bigleaf and silver maples, cherry and madrona.

"People who buy furniture here are adventurers," says Mr. Meyer. "They see the tree and get to be part of the process. They have to have an adventurous spirit, they have to be patient, and they have to trust. There's an element of risk."

Those adventurers might be surprised to learn that Mr. Meyer, 40, is a high-school dropout. He radiates a discerning obsession with the details of design and the philosophy of craftsmanship. "Some people drop out of school because they can't cut it," says Mr. Wells. "Others drop out because school doesn't cut it for them. That's Seth."

Mr. Meyer says he grew up in a house "with a lot of aesthetic awareness."

"My stepfather was a furniture maker," he adds. "There was always a lot of discussion about beauty and craft." Everything in the built environment was up for critique. "We'd be driving along and someone would say: 'Look at the back end of that car. What a missed opportunity!' "

Mr. Wells is 45, coolly cerebral and stuffed with education. Mr. Meyer describes him as the optimistic force in the partnership, the one who argues for the new tool or venture and sustains the faith that it all will work out. He has a bachelor's degree in English from the College of Wooster in Ohio, and another in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design. His résumé is also flocked with sawdust. In high school he made a Chippendale desk that scored second in a statewide shop-class competition in North Carolina.

Like Mr. Meyer, he once ran a one-man custom furniture shop. The two met at a mutual friend's dinner party, worked on a couple of projects together, then decided to form a new company.

Now in production is a large dining table from two storm-felled red elms. At this point, the slabs are propped against a wall, notes and lines chalked on them. A notation beside a two-foot-long crack specifies, "OPEN." The crack will be cleaned up and stabilized, but not filled or hidden. "I see a bird in it, maybe a heron," Mr. Meyer says, admiring its form. The slabs will be mated not with ruler-straight joints, but with painstakingly curved cuts in line with the grain patterns.

He suddenly becomes a tour guide to a whole geography embedded in the wood ­ "islands" and "cathedrals" in the grain. "I'm looking to see how the grain of one board flows into the next so that the composition feels harmonious," he says. "In every piece, I'm looking for some kind of rhythm and balance. It's an intuitive process, not something with a set of rules I could ever write down."

If there's one rule in the shop, it's this: Respect the tree's narrative ­ including the chapters about its hard urban life. Mr. Meyer once found a steel snippet embedded in a beautiful cherry slab, perhaps a remnant of a nail used to hammer a "lost cat" sign to the tree. He left it in place, a piece of the story.

Nearly all of their pieces feature the trendy "live edge" ­ an edge of the slab left unmilled to celebrate the topography of the tree trunk. The technique today can be accused of being a cliché, but nature still provides a universe of forms and textures to admire. Some edges seem to ripple with geologic strata; some display miniature badlands of canyons and ridges. The Meyer Wells philosophy is to impose as little human design as possible.

The timber rolls in through motley channels. Some local arborists are plugged in and know when to call. One day, Mr. Meyer was driving near a Seattle lot that was to be the site of a new apartment building. A sprawling bigleaf maple arrested him.

"I had to make several calls, but I finally got to the demolition contractor," Mr. Meyer recalls. "He said, 'Oh yeah, we're just going to take it to the dump.' " As usual, Meyer Wells took the timber for nothing, but the cost of trucking it to the company's yard is typically $500 for an urban tree salvage.

Although the designs are minimalist, the costs add up ­ for drying, milling, design, joining the component pieces and finishing. Coffee and dining tables mostly range from $3,000 to $10,000, while runwaylike conference tables can easily hit $20,000.

Mr. Wells says they essentially use a cost-plus pricing model, but because each piece ­ and each tree's constellation of problems ­ is different, "sometimes we do well at the pricing, and sometimes we don't."

"But it all seems to average out," he adds, "and we're getting better at it."

Where Mr. Meyer still loves to ponder the expressive possibilities of a crack in a slab, Mr. Wells now seems propelled more by the big-ticket issue of sustainability. "I really believe a designer can make better choices, and that can influence people and move us in a direction that's more sustainable," he says. "That's what I've chosen to do, and I think it's what's made us a successful business."

SUSTAINABLE furniture isn't recession-proof. The company's residential business shrank in the last two years, but increases in corporate commissions more than made up the difference, Mr. Wells said. Now the residential orders are wrenching back up, and Mr. Wells remains a dogged optimist.

"People buy what they believe is right for them to buy," he says. "If there are options available that fit better with their values, they will buy those options."

The business's current challenge is in remaining faithful to its roots. Ms. Pomeroy of the Green Chamber of Commerce notes that one of the universal hazards for green businesses is trying too hard to uphold all their ideals while the gritty realities of everyday economics gnaw away at them. Sometimes, she says, they fail to understand that fully incorporating their values would mean changing the world's economic systems.

In fact, Meyer Wells is trying to save increasingly large chunks of the world. Early this year, it started a subsidiary venture, Green Tree Mill, that will extend its reach into Puget Sound's surrounding forests, harvesting and milling trees that the larger sawmills don't want. Instead of being turned directly into custom furniture, this lumber will be marketed directly to builders.

"I have sleepless nights," Mr. Wells acknowledges. "The mill is pushing us to a new level of risk, with a potentially higher level of reward."

Mr. Meyer seems to crave equilibrium more than growth, and longs for more time to put his hands on a fallen tree and massage its natural beauty.

"We're faced with the not unsatisfying challenge of injecting efficiency into an essentially creative process," he says. "From the classic viewpoint of American business, it's probably a fool's errand. But hey, so far we're making it work."

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2010, on page BU1 of the New York edition.

German Economy Leaping Forward as Americans Fall Behind ANS

Here's a real short one.  Germany is doing better recovering from the "Recession" than we are.  Here's why.
Find it here:  http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2010/08/german-economy-leaping-forward-americans-fall-behind
--Kim

German Economy Leaping Forward as Americans Fall Behind

Submitted by louisehartmann on 13. August 2010 - 7:59

by Thom Hartmann

The official figures are showing that the German economy has leaped forward by 2.2% in the three months to the end of June, its fastest quarterly growth in more than 20 years. The German national statistics office said, "Such quarter-on-quarter growth has never been recorded before in reunified Germany."  The higher-than-expected growth was due to strong exports, helped by a weaker euro. The eurozone economy grew by 1% during the quarter. Another big factory in the continuing growth of the German economy is that during the Great Recession German workers never saw layoffs or significant reductions in pay. This is because all German corporations are required to have a board of directors comprised 50% of workers, and that during the financial crisis the German government filled int he pay gaps of workers working fewer hours. Thus demand never dropped in the German economy, because workers always had a good paycheck, and so their economy continues to be robust.

How Jehovah's Witnesses helped kill Prop 8 ANS

this is an interesting little article about the legal precedent that Judge Walker used to say that rights could not be removed by voting on them.  
Find it here:  http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-08-06-engardio05_ST_N.htm
--Kim


How Jehovah's Witnesses helped kill Prop 8
Updated 8/5/2010 5:00 PM |  Comments 757 |  Recommend 74 E-mail | Save | Print |
 
 Enlarge By Kevork Djansezian, Getty Images
Plaintiffs Paul Katami, left, and his partner Jeff Zarrillo, center, greet supporters during a rally in West Hollywood, Calif., to celebrate the ruling Wednesday to overturn Proposition 8.

 USA TODAY OPINION

On Religion

Faith. Religion. Spirituality. Meaning.

In our ever-shrinking world, the tentacles of religion touch everything from governmental policy to individual morality to our basic social constructs. It affects the lives of people of great faith ­ or no faith at all.

This series of weekly columns ­ launched in 2005 ­ seeks to illuminate the national conversation.
---------------------------------
By Joel P. Engardio
Mormons took a lot of abuse for helping pass Proposition 8 in California, where 52% of voters banned the right of gay couples to marry in 2008. But will anyone thank Jehovah's Witnesses for their role in getting the law declared unconstitutional?

One of the biggest outcries over Prop 8 was that the fundamental rights of a minority group could be taken away by popular vote ­ which isn't supposed to happen in America, land of the free.

Vaughn Walker, the federal judge who struck down Prop 8 this week, boldly said it "was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples." He also minced no words with the electorate: "That the majority of California voters supported Proposition 8 is irrelevant."

This is where Jehovah's Witnesses come in. On Page 116 of Judge Walker's ruling, he cites a 1943 Supreme Court case where the high court did a rare reversal of itself, acknowledging a mistake it made in a Jehovah's Witness case three years earlier. What happened between 1940 and 1943 to Jehovah's Witnesses gave Judge Walker in 2010 his most potent precedent to show that voter will does not trump the protection of minority rights.

A villain of that era

In the 1940s, Jehovah's Witnesses weren't just unpopular and marginalized. They were seen as criminal and a threat to democracy. It was blasphemous enough that they preached there was no hell or trinity and went knocking on doors to say so. But they also refused to salute the flag or say the Pledge of Allegiance.

Lillian Gobitas was among thousands of Jehovah's Witness children expelled from public school for not saluting the flag. Her case ( Minersville School District v. Gobitis) went to the Supreme Court and a fundamental question was asked: Should a free society force its citizens to engage in patriotic ritual? In 1940, the court said yes. National unity was at stake.

But Jehovah's Witnesses wouldn't comply, saying the flag salute is an idolatrous act of worship of a man-made symbol, which is forbidden by God. In response, mobs attacked Jehovah's Witnesses in 44 states, burned their houses of worship and beat them. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt spoke out against the violence. At the height of World War II, when the U.S. was fighting nationalism in Germany, where Jehovah's Witnesses were being sent to concentration camps for refusing to do the Nazi salute, the Supreme Court revisited the case ( West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette). A stunning reversal was announced June 14, 1943 ­ Flag Day.

In 2010, the value Judge Walker saw in the Jehovah's Witness case was how Justice Robert Jackson in 1943 addressed the "tyranny of the majority," a problem that's been around since at least 1835 when Alexis de Tocqueville first wrote the phrase in his book, Democracy in America.

The 1940 Supreme Court used "national unity" to justify forcing kids to salute the flag. It also said the threat of being expelled from school was a good way to achieve compliance. If anyone felt put out, the court said, he could seek remedy at the ballot box by asking the majority to see it his way.

When Justice Jackson got the chance to reverse the 1940 ruling, he tackled the ballot box notion head-on. He wrote that the "very purpose" of the Bill of Rights was to protect some issues from the volatility of politics and "place them beyond the reach of majorities."

"One's right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly," Jackson said, "may not be submitted to vote."

Rights trump elections

Judge Walker used Jackson's line in striking down the 52% majority vote that had taken away the fundamental right of gay and lesbian couples to marry in California.

While we can thank Jehovah's Witnesses for this precedent that aims to prevent tyranny of the majority, it should be noted they don't like gay marriage. They consider it sin and aren't afraid to say so. But not one devoted Jehovah's Witness voted for or supported Prop 8. Jehovah's Witnesses are apolitical. Rather than forcing their beliefs through legislation, they prefer to find converts by sharing a message.

Justice Jackson saw how protecting the rights of an unpopular religion demonstrated the beauty and full potential of the Bill of Rights for every unpopular group to follow.

"Fundamental rights," Jackson wrote in 1943 and Judge Walker quoted in 2010, "depend on the outcome of no elections."

Joel P. Engardio directed KNOCKING, an award-winning PBS documentary about Jehovah's Witnesses. He is a 2011 MPA candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Top 5 Social Security Myths ANS

this is about Social Security.  The Right keeps spreading lies about it, because they want to destroy it. You've probably seen this before, but just in case you haven't, here it is. This is the story; the myths and the truth.  It's from MoveOn. 
Find it here:  http://pol.moveon.org/ssmyths/index.html?rc=homepage 
--Kim

Top 5 Social Security Myths

Rumors of Social Security's demise are greatly exaggerated. But some powerful people keep spreading lies about the program to scare people into accepting benefit cuts. Can you check out this list of Social Security myths and share it with your friends, family and coworkers?

Myth: Social Security is going broke.

Reality: There is no Social Security crisis. By 2023, Social Security will have a $4.3 trillion surplus (yes, trillion with a 'T'). It can pay out all scheduled benefits for the next quarter-century with no changes whatsoever.¹ After 2037, it'll still be able to pay out 75% of scheduled benefits--and again, that's without any changes. The program started preparing for the Baby Boomers retirement decades ago.² Anyone who insists Social Security is broke probably wants to break it themselves.

---

Myth: We have to raise the retirement age because people are living longer.

Reality: This is a red-herring to trick you into agreeing to benefit cuts. Retirees are living about the same amount of time as they were in the 1930s. The reason average life expectancy is higher is mostly because many fewer people die as children than did 70 years ago.³ What's more, what gains there have been are distributed very unevenly--since 1972, life expectancy increased by 6.5 years for workers in the top half of the income brackets, but by less than 2 years for those in the bottom half.⁴ But those intent on cutting Social Security love this argument because raising the retirement age is the same as an across-the-board benefit cut.

---

Myth: Benefit cuts are the only way to fix Social Security.

Reality: Social Security doesn't need to be fixed. But if we want to strengthen it, here's a better way: Make the rich pay their fair share. If the very rich paid taxes on all of their income, Social Security would be sustainable for decades to come.⁵ Right now, high earners only pay Social Security taxes on the first $106,000 of their income.⁶ But conservatives insist benefit cuts are the only way because they want to protect the super-rich from paying their fair share.

---

Myth: The Social Security Trust Fund has been raided and is full of IOUs

Reality: Not even close to true. The Social Security Trust Fund isn't full of IOUs, it's full of U.S. Treasury Bonds. And those bonds are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.⁷ The reason Social Security holds only treasury bonds is the same reason many Americans do: The federal government has never missed a single interest payment on its debts. President Bush wanted to put Social Security funds in the stock market--which would have been disastrous--but luckily, he failed. So the trillions of dollars in the Social Security Trust Fund, which are separate from the regular budget, are as safe as can be.

---

Myth: Social Security adds to the deficit

Reality: It's not just wrong -- it's impossible! By law, Social Security funds are separate from the budget, and it must pay its own way. That means that Social Security can't add one penny to the deficit.1

---

Sources:

1."To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security" New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010
http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/14/to-defict-hawks-we-the-people-know-best-on-social-security-12290/

2. "The Straight Facts on Social Security" Economic Opportunity Institute, September 2009
http://www.eoionline.org/retirement_security/fact_sheets/StraightFactsSocialSecurity-Sep09.pdf

3. "Social Security and the Age of Retirement"Center for Economic and Policy Research, June 2010
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/social-security-and-the-age-of-retirement/

4. "More on raising the retirement age" Ezra Klein, Washington Post, July 8, 2010
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/07/more_on_raising_the_retirement.html

5. "Social Security is sustainable" Economic and Policy Institute, May 27, 2010
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/social_security_is_sustainable/

6. "Maximum wage contribution and the amount for a credit in 2010." Social Security Administration, April 23, 2010
http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/240

7. "Trust Fund FAQs" Social Security Administration, February 18, 2010
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/ProgData/fundFAQ.html

8. "To Deficit Hawks: We the People Know Best on Social Security" New Deal 2.0, June 14, 2010
http://www.newdeal20.org/2010/06/14/to-defict-hawks-we-the-people-know-best-on-social-security-12290/

Fwd: Disgraced HP CEO to get nearly $28 million ANS

One of our readers sent this in, with the comment in brown.  my comment back to her is the paragraph below. 
--Kim

You're right, the fact that we live in a society where someone who does this kind of illegal and immoral stuff gets $28m instead of a jail term, sucks.   There is something wrong with our culture that we put up with this.  One essay I read claims that it is Capitalism itself that makes this happen.  It made a good case for it.  Capitalism certainly does reward psychopathic behavior and ruthlessness.  Something must change!  Now, who's going to change it and how?
--Kim



At 07:39 AM 8/7/2010, you wrote:

I'm sorry..but it really DOES pay to be an S.O.B. !!!!!!!!!!

 

Disgraced HP CEO to get nearly $28 million

 

FILE - In this file photo made March 3, 2010, Hewlett-Packard Company Chairman and Chief E...

By JORDAN ROBERTSON and RACHEL METZ, AP
Sat Aug 7, 7:06 AM EDT

Lauded for making Hewlett-Packard Co. the world's biggest technology company, CEO Mark Hurd was in negotiations for a new contract worth about $100 million, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.

Instead, he's getting about a third of that to just go away.

In a stunning announcement Friday, HP said it ousted Hurd after an investigation of a sexual harassment complaint found that he had falsified expense reports and other documents to conceal a relationship with a contractor. Hurd also allegedly helped the woman get paid for work she didn't do.

In recent weeks, Hurd was in negotiations for a new three-year contract worth about $100 million when a woman who worked for HP as a host at high-profile events accused him of sexual harassment, a person with intimate knowledge of the case told The Associated Press. The person requested anonymity because this person wasn't authorized to speak publicly about the details of the case.

News of Hurd's abrupt departure sent HP's stock tumbling nearly 10 percent. Shares of the world's biggest maker of personal computers and printers have doubled in value during his five-year stewardship, and HP became the world's No. 1 technology company by revenue in that time.

Hurd's "systematic pattern" of submitting falsified financial reports to hide the relationship convinced the board that "it would be impossible for him to be an effective leader moving forward and that he had to step down," HP general counsel Michael Holston said on a conference call Friday with analysts.

"The facts that drove the decision for the company had to with integrity, had to do with credibility, had to do with honesty," Holston said, declining to elaborate.

Holston said the inaccurate financial reports related only to Hurd's personal expenses.

Hurd, 53, acknowledged there were "instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP."

High-profile Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred said she is representing the woman and "there was no affair and no intimate sexual relationship" between her client and Hurd. Allred, reached by The Associated Press late Friday, declined to comment further.

The person close to the case told the AP that the woman worked as a host for more than a dozen events for CEOs that Hurd attended between 2007 and 2009. The person said the disputed expenses range from $1,000 to $20,000 each for travel, lodging and meals.

The person said many of the expenses were for meals after the events and that Hurd insists they were legitimate business expenses. The total amount of the expenses in dispute could not be learned.

Hurd has offered to repay expenses that were incorrectly filed, this person said.

The married father of two will get a $12.2 million severance payment and nearly 350,000 shares of HP stock worth about $16 million at Friday's closing price. The company also extended the deadline for exercising options to buy up to 775,000 HP shares.

The company's chief financial officer, Cathie Lesjak, 51, was named interim CEO. She has been with the company 24 years but has taken herself out of the running to fill the position permanently. HP has set up a search committee to look for a permanent replacement.

HP's shares, which closed Friday on the New York Stock Exchange at $46.30, tumbled 9.7 percent after hours to $41.85 as investors reacted to the news released after the close of markets.

Beloved by investors for his relentless cost-cutting — and scornned by thousands of laid-off employees for the same — Hurd was seen as rescuing the company from the mess left behind by his predecessor, Carly Fiorina.

Hurd has transformed the 71-year-old company from a computer and printer maker hooked on profits from printer cartridges into a company that looks a lot like its archrival IBM Corp., a major player in technology services and other fast-growing areas.

Though their underlying stories are very different, Hurd's departure is like Fiorina's in one key way: Both were forced out with the company about to reap the benefits of sweeping changes they made at the Silicon Valley institution.

Fiorina left in 2005 in the wake of her decision to acquire Compaq Computer and an ensuing upheaval over her personality and her business strategies, but the divisive deal proved instrumental in HP's ascendance under Hurd.

By comparison, Hurd is departing after cutting tens of thousands of jobs and launching an expensive expansion, including the $13.9 billion acquisition of technology-services provider Electronic Data Systems, the $2.7 billion takeover of computer-networking equipment maker 3Com Corp. and the $1.4 billion deal for mobile phone maker Palm Inc.

To reassure investors, HP, based in Palo Alto, previewed its third-quarter results late Friday in advance of a detailed report Aug. 19.

The company said it expects to report earnings of 75 cents per share, compared with 67 cents a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, the company says results will be $1.08 per share, a penny ahead of analysts' current expectations. Revenue is expected to rise 11 percent from last year to $30.7 billion, slightly higher than analysts' expectations.

The company's forecast for the current quarter, which ends in October, is roughly in line with analysts' expectations.

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


 

Fwd: The Associated Press: Senate passes bill to save teacher, police jobs ANS

Hi -- a bit of good news for a change.  We noticed this in the local newspaper and said, "Hey, why didn't we hear about this before?"  so we thought maybe you didn't hear either.  It's about federal help for states to pay teachers and others. 
--Kim

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ibkvUXhJ5N4Gt8aysY7y8S62PyFwD9HDEDG03

-- Shared using Google Toolbar

To deal with the deficit, let the tax cuts expire ANS

Here is a good explanation of why we should end Bush's tax cuts, at least for the rich.  I've highlighted a bit. 
Find it here:   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/01/AR2010080103287.html  
--Kim



 
 
To deal with the deficit, let the tax cuts expire

By Fareed Zakaria
Monday, August 2, 2010; A13

For the past few months, we have heard powerful, passionate arguments about the need to cut America's massive budget deficit. Republican senators have claimed that we are in danger of permanently crippling the economy. Conservative economists and pundits warn of a Greece-like crisis in which America will be able to borrow only at exorbitant interest rates. So when an opportunity presents itself to cut those deficits by about a quarter -- more than $300 billion! -- permanently and relatively easily, you would think that these people would be leading the way. Far from it.

The "Bush tax cuts," passed in 2001 and 2003, remain the single largest cause of America's structural deficit -- that is, the deficit not caused by the collapse in tax revenue when the economy goes into recession. The Bush administration inherited budget surpluses from the Clinton administration. What turned these into deficits, even before the recession? There were three fundamental new costs: the tax cuts, the Medicare prescription-drug bill and post-9/11 security spending (including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). Of these the tax cuts were by far the largest, adding up to $2.3 trillion over 10 years. According to the Congressional Budget Office, nearly half the cost of all legislation enacted from 2001 to 2007 can be attributed to the tax cuts.

Those cuts are set to expire this year. Republicans say they want to keep them all, even for those making more than $250,000 a year (less than 3 percent of Americans), because higher taxes will hurt the recovery. But for months Republicans have also been arguing that the chief threat to the economy is our gargantuan debt and deficit. That's what's scaring consumers, creditors and businesses. Yet given a chance to address those fears by getting serious about deficit reduction, they run away. By contrast, British Prime Minister David Cameron, a genuine fiscal conservative, concluded that to deal with his country's deficit, which in structural terms is not so different from America's, he would have to raise taxes as well as cut spending.

Democrats, for their part, are also running scared, proposing to keep all the tax cuts except those affecting the very rich. But they were opposed to these tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. If they were a bad idea when budget deficits were small, why are tax cuts a good idea when deficits are around $1.3 trillion?

The idea that the average American is overtaxed is a nice piece of populist pandering. In fact, federal taxes as a percentage of the economy are at their lowest level since the Truman administration. Chuck Marr and Gillian Brunet of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have calculated that a family of four at the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 4.6 percent of its income in taxes. Remember, almost half of the country pays no income taxes at all. The top 2 percent of Americans contribute almost 50 percent of federal income taxes.

The simple facts are these: All of the Bush tax cuts were unaffordable. They were an irresponsible act of hubris enacted during an economic boom. Conservatives thought they would force us to shrink the government. But with Republicans controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, did reduced taxes cause reduced spending? No. They led to ever-increasing borrowing and a ballooning deficit.

We have one of the smallest governments among all the world's rich countries. Yet we refuse to pay for it. (Yes, health-care spending is the big exception and, yes, we will have to get those costs under control.) I understand the fear that this is not a good time to raise taxes. But the impact of marginal shifts in tax rates on growth is pretty unclear. Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1992 and ushered in a period of extraordinarily robust growth. George W. Bush cut taxes massively in 2001 and got meager growth in return. Three tax cuts enacted since the financial crisis have done little to spur growth. In any event, if timing is the issue, Congress could extend all the tax cuts for a year but then let them expire. Better yet, spend money on far more efficient ways to spur job creation, such as tax credits for jobs, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would create four to six times as many jobs as would tax cuts.

I don't like our current tax system. It's unwieldy, it taxes the wrong things (income instead of consumption) and its loopholes are legalized corruption. But we are not going to create the perfect tax code today. In front of us is a simple, easy way to bring America's fiscal house in order, reduce our dependence on foreign borrowing, restore U.S. credibility and power, and provide a stable revenue base from which to make key investments for future growth. All we need is for Congress to do what it does so well: nothing.

Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International. His e-mail address is comments@fareedzakaria.com .

The truth about global warming ANS

this is a very short article about global warming and the latest scientific word about it.  Send it to your doubter friends and relatives. 
Find it here:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/01/AR2010080102850.html  
--Kim


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The truth about global warming

Network News

Monday, August 2, 2010

IN A DEPRESSING case of irony by juxtaposition, the death of climate change legislation in the Senate has been followed by the appearance of two government reports in the past week that underscore the overwhelming scientific case for global warming -- and go out of the way to repudiate skeptics.

First came a report on global climate from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which confirmed that the 2000s were by far the warmest decade in the instrumental record -- as were, in their turns, the 1980s and the 1990s. Unlike year-to-year fluctuations, these 10-year shifts are statistically significant. Further, the report notes that it derived its conclusions from an array of data sources -- not just the land-surface readings that doubters challenge -- from ocean heat uptake to melting land ice to sea level rise.

"If the land surface records were systematically flawed and the globe had not really warmed, then it would be almost impossible to explain the concurrent changes in this wide range of indicators produced by many independent groups," the report said. "The warming of the climate system is unequivocal." The gases most likely responsible for that warming, such as carbon dioxide, continue to accumulate.

Second was a strongly worded response from the Environmental Protection Agency to petitions that it revoke its finding that "climate change is real, is occurring due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities and threatens human health and environment." As with much climate-change skepticism, the petitions were based "on selectively edited, out-of-context data and a manufactured controversy," EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said. Among other things, the agency reviewed every document from the "Climategate" e-mail hack at a respected British climate research unit. The EPA found what four other independent studies did: that the e-mails contained some "candid" language but nothing that seriously discredits the scientific consensus on global warming.

Perhaps it is still too much to hope that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II will call off his misguided investigation of climate scientist Michael Mann, which seems to be based on the e-mail affair. Many climate-change skeptics will simply dismiss these reports as more evidence of a sprawling conspiracy instead of what they really are: yet more affirmation of the risks humanity runs if it continues to pump carbon into the atmosphere.