for those of us old enough to remember the Chad Mitchel trio and "The John Birch Society."

Government Debt and Deficits Are Not the Problem. Private Debt Is.

There are two quite different perspectives in the set of speeches at this conference. Many on our morning panels – Steve Keen, William Greider, and earlier Yves Smith and Robert Kuttner – have warned about the economy being strapped by debt. The debt we are talking about is private-sector debt. But most officials this afternoon focus on government debt and budget deficits as the problem – especially social spending such as Social Security, not bailouts to the banks and Federal Reserve credit to re-inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds.

To us this morning, government deficit spending into the economy is the solution. The problem is private debt. And in contrast to Federal Reserve and Treasury bailout policy, we view the problem not as real estate prices too low to cover bank reserves. The problem is the carrying charges on this private debt, and the fact that debt service is eating into personal income – and also business income – to deflate the economy.

Mortgage debt that is still leading to foreclosures, evictions, and is depressing the real estate market for most buyers except for all-cash hedge funds;

http://michael-hudson.com/2013/03/government-debt-and-deficits-are-not-the-problem-private-debt-is/

Southern poverty pimps; The “original sin” of the Southern political class is cheap, powerless labor

Contemporary American politics cannot be understood apart from the North-South divide in the U.S., as I and others have argued. Neither can contemporary American economic debates. The real choice facing America in the 21st century is the same one that faced it in the 19th and 20th centuries — Northernomics or Southernomics?

Northernomics is the high-road strategy of building a flourishing national economy by means of government-business cooperation and government investment in R&D, infrastructure and education. Although this program of Hamiltonianism (named after Washington’s first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton) has been championed by maverick Southerners as prominent as George Washington, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln (born in Kentucky to a Southern family), the building of a modern, high-tech, high-wage economy has been supported chiefly by political parties based in New England and the Midwest, from the Federalists and the Whigs through the Lincoln Republicans and today’s Northern Democrats.

Southernomics is radically different. The purpose of the age-old economic development strategy of the Southern

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/19/southern_poverty_pimps/

The Science of Why Comment Trolls Suck

When Tax Revenues Fall Short, Who Gets Paid?

Almost two years, in The Price of Insufficient Tax Revenue, I described how the “success” of tax reduction in New Jersey compelled the city of Camden to lay off half of its police force and one-third of its fire fighters. A few weeks later, in When Tax Cuts Cause Privatization, Taxpayers Pay More, Not Less, I explained how Camden also was compelled to fire its animal-control officers, with their jobs turned over to a private company, at a cost exceeding what it cost to employ the animal-control officers. It’s easy to identify the winners and losers in this tax-cut game.

Now comes news that another city in fiscal trouble, Oakland, California, dealt with the impact of revenue reductions by laying off one-fourth of its police force. Oakland ranks fifth among American cities when it comes to crime rates. Discharging 25 percent of the police force is a foolish thing to do. Oakland police have confessed that someone calling 911 is “looking at an indeterminate amount of time before an officer can respond.” Crime rates in Oakland have soared since the cuts took effect.

Oakland, facing a $32 million deficit, did not touch a $17.3 million payment that it makes to the Oakland Raiders and the Oakland Athletics. The Raiders, however, are not content with these payments. Instead, the team threatens to move to Santa Clara unless Oakland forks over support for a $1.5 billion stadium.

Oakland is not the only city that chose private professional sports over police protection for its citizens. Jacksonville fired police and cut other services so that it could repeatedly reduce the rent that it charges the Jaguars for use of the stadium partially funded by taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars support professional sports teams throughout the country. Most of those teams are owned by billionaires.

http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/2012_12_01_archive.html#8049761010387212239

Welfare Spending: Medicare vs Corporate/Business Subsidies:

(or does the GOP really support WalMart's behavior in Bangladesh?)

As most readers know, the federal government is currently in what passes for negotiations between the President's Democratic Party Senate and House members and the GOP members that control the House.

The Tea Party and its right-wing rhetoric has of course had a radicalizing impact on the GOP positions, with members not only beholden to Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge (all strongly supported by various right-wing propaganda tanks like the Tax Foundation, Heritage, American Enterprise, and other organizations) but also to the anti-social welfare corporatists like David and Charles Koch, the Wal-Mart heirs, and other oligarchic families that constitute the top 1% of US income and wealth. As a result of these two strong influences, the GOP now stands for

•tax-cuts-no-matter-what (and for tax cuts that benefit the wealthy most of all, as reflected in the rigid position in favor of the "carried interest" scam used by private equity profits partners and the extraordinarily preferential rate for capital gains and dividends included in the "net capital gain" definition under section 1(h)(11)); and
•so-called "entitlement reforms", by which GOPers generally mean reduction in benefits and/or privatization of social welfare programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (All of this is argued in terms of caring about "saving" the programs for the future, but the truth lies in the ways that the right proposes changes to the programs--not changes in costs related to profits taken out by Big Pharma and similar interests, but changes in benefits to ordinary Americans (such as raising the working age for eligibility even though those who work at the hardest labor need benefits earlier, not later, or lowering the cost-of-living-allowance adjustment to benefits for Medicare, even though seniors generally have a HIGHER cost of living because of their increased medical needs, including prescription drugs for diabetes, high blood pressure, and similar diseases particularly prevalent in the elderly population.)

The sum of those positions stands for a corporatist philosophy of benefitting the oligarchy and their business enterprises at the expense of everyday Americans who work for a living.

http://ataxingmatter.blogs.com/tax/2012/12/welfare-spending-medicare-vs-corporate-subsidies.html

The Founders’ Muddled Legacy on the Right to Bear Arms Is Killing Us

A case of 18th-century politicking has stymied our ability to deal with a 21st-century crisis.
August 14, 2012 |

Amid horrifying reports of American gun violence -- the latest from College Station, Texas, yesterday, and Aurora, Colorado, last month -- it's natural for Americans on all sides of the dire issue of gun control and gun ownership to invoke our founders' legacy regarding arms and rights. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution famously asserts a "right of the people to keep and bear arms." Determining what the founders meant by that right has long seemed critical to winning arguments for or against gun legislation.

But that’s a slippery slope. Any serious effort to address whatever lies behind the astonishing rate of American gun violence should really begin by criticising the founders’ contradictory stance on this issue, not appealing to it.

Paul Ryan, the presumptive Republican nominee for vice-president, who champions rights of gun owners, believes that the U.S. is unique for having been founded on the idea that "our rights come from nature and God, not government.” Ryan's attitude reflects a pervasive desire, across the American political spectrum, to ground current political positions in what many Americans see as absolute rights, protected for us by our founders in the U.S. Constitution.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/founders-muddled-legacy-right-bear-arms-killing-us

How We Became Israel

Peace means dominion for Netanyahu—and now for us.

By Andrew J. Bacevich • September 10, 2012

The Reality of Nightmares

In his 12/8 Washington Post column, Ezra Klein says, “Projected deficits are driven by two factors: health-care-costs and old people.” He goes on to suggest, quite logically it seems, that in order to pay for all the health-care services elderly American’s are going to require, tax rates will to have to be raised so high they’ll begin “doing real damage to the economy”, or deficits will “grow to the point that they cause a fiscal crisis.”

What’s odd about this is that it sounds to me like a huge, growth-industry opportunity: lots of customers (old people) needing lots of services and facilities (nursing-care, hospital beds, heart monitors, breathing tubes, etc.) I could well imagine that if we truly embraced the need to provide all these services and facilities, it might grow our GDP by four or five percent. Just taking really good care of old people—feeding them, reading to them, taking them for walks, massaging their feet, helping them grow tomatoes—could likely lower the national unemployment rate by three or four percentage points.

In his 12/8 Washington Post column, Ezra Klein says, “Projected deficits are driven by two factors: health-care-costs and old people.” He goes on to suggest, quite logically it seems, that in order to pay for all the health-care services elderly American’s are going to require, tax rates will to have to be raised so high they’ll begin “doing real damage to the economy”, or deficits will “grow to the point that they cause a fiscal crisis.”
What’s odd about this is that it sounds to me like a huge, growth-industry opportunity: lots of customers (old people) needing lots of services and facilities (nursing-care, hospital beds, heart monitors, breathing tubes, etc.) I could well imagine that if we truly embraced the need to provide all these services and facilities, it might grow our GDP by four or five percent. Just taking really good care of old people—feeding them, reading to them, taking them for walks, massaging their feet, helping them grow tomatoes—could likely lower the national unemployment rate by three or four percentage points

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2012/12/the-reality-of-nightmares.html

Researchers find crippling flaws in global GPS

Researchers have developed three attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unmanned drones.

The scenarios developed include novel remote attacks via malicious GPS broadcasts against consumer and professional- grade receivers which could be launched using $2500 worth of equipment.

A 45-second crafted GPS message could bring down up to 30 percent of the global GPS Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS), while other attacks could take down 20 percent of NTRIP networks, security boffins from Carnegie Mellon University and firm Coherent Navigation wrote in a paper. (pdf)

The stations provide global navigation satellite system data to support "safety and life-critical applications", and NTRIP is the protocol used to stream that data online.

Together, attack scenarios created "serious ramifications to safety systems".

"Until GPS is secured, life and safety-critical applications that depend upon it are likely vulnerable to attack," the team of four researchers said.

Researchers have developed three attacks capable of crippling Global Positioning System infrastructure critical to the navigation of a host of military and civilian technologies including planes, ships and unmanned drones.

The scenarios developed include novel remote attacks via malicious GPS broadcasts against consumer and professional- grade receivers which could be launched using $2500 worth of equipment.

A 45-second crafted GPS message could bring down up to 30 percent of the global GPS Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS), while other attacks could take down 20 percent of NTRIP networks, security boffins from Carnegie Mellon University and firm Coherent Navigation wrote in a paper. (pdf)

The stations provide global navigation satellite system data to support "safety and life-critical applications", and NTRIP is the protocol used to stream that data online.

Together, attack scenarios created "serious ramifications to safety systems".

"Until GPS is secured, life and safety-critical applications that depend upon it are likely vulnerable to attack," the team of four researchers said

http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/325731,researchers-find-crippling-flaws-in-global-gps.aspx