kpete
kpete's JournalThere Is CONSENSUS On How To Fix Economy
March 19, 2012
There Is Consensus On How To Fix Economy
-- by Dave Johnson
“There was clearly something wrong with the U.S. economy long before the crash.”
Consensus
Consensus. Again and again, people who examine what went wrong with our economy leading up to the great recession come to the same conclusions! Study after study, book after book, statement after statement, op-ed after op-ed, organization after organization, expert after expert, all weighing in, all coming to the same conclusions. One after another voices speak up ..., voicing their understanding of what happened to the economy, what caused the crash and what we have to do to fix things. One after another they voice the same conclusions: our economy was damaged by,
trade deals that damaged vital industries and led to trade deficits, layoffs and wage cuts;
deregulation of rules that protected working people, unions, vital economic sectors and the commons of public wealth;
and cuts in crucial areas of investment in our people and our economic future, including education & job training, infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, transportation and R&D into new technologies.
All of these betrayals of the social contract were enabled by the influence of big money on our political system, including huge sums spent on an infrastructure of corporate/conservative organizations designed to propagandize the public into accepting these changes - or at least keeping the victims from rebelling.
more, plus links:
http://www.seeingtheforest.com/archives/2012/03/there_is_consen.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SeeingTheForest+%28Seeing+The+Forest%29
GRAPH: The Most Conservative Congress EVER Recorded
more:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/03/19/446680/most-conservative-congress/
Seniors see savings ($2.16 billion) on Rx drugs under 2010 health care law
Source: USA Today
WASHINGTON – Almost 4 million seniors saved about $2.16 billion through discounts for their prescription medications in 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services plans to announce today.
Government costs for prescription medications through Medicare should decrease after seniors saved more than $2 billion in 2011 through discounts offered by the program.
This, administrators say, should help keep costs to the government down in the future.
"Before, many beneficiaries were forced to stop taking the drugs," said Jonathan Blum, director of the Center for Medicare. "This reduces costs through better management."
When Medicare recipients are able to take their medications, Blum said, they are hospitalized less often for heart attacks, low blood sugar and asthma attacks. So far, he added, available data don't reflect savings for those hospitalizations to Medicare.
Read more: http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/healthcare/story/2012-03-19/Seniors-see-savings-on-Rx-drugs-under-2010-health-care-law/53621502/1
Sen. Daniel Akaka: Congress should stop targeting federal employees
http://thebottom99percent.com/debatewatch-perry-on-government-spending/
Congress should stop targeting federal employees
By SEN. DANIEL K. AKAKA
Sen. Daniel Akaka: Congress should stop targeting federal employees - Hard-working federal employees are being squeezed by Congress again, as some of my colleagues attempt to attach an extension of the pay freeze to pending highway funding bills. This comes after Congress last month effectively cut the pay of new employees by forcing them to pay more toward their pensions — permanently — to offset the costs of just 10 months of unemployment. I strongly oppose this new habit of picking the pockets of America’s dedicated middle-class public servants. [...]
CBO’s report said that workers without college degrees were paid higher average wages in the federal government than in the private sector, but noted that workers with college degrees — the bulk of the federal workforce — were paid about the same, and workers with graduate or professional degrees were paid significantly less. Averaged across all categories, federal workers were paid 2 percent more.
However, the report was flawed.
CBO relied on limited survey data of self-reported wages and occupations, and some federal contractors inaccurately reported that they are federal employees. CBO did not account for complexity or other aspects of jobs, instead using broad occupational categories. As Office of Personnel Management Director John Berry pointed out, we should pay the federal forklift operator transporting nuclear-tipped torpedoes more than the private-sector forklift operator moving boxes
article here:
http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20120318/ADOP06/203180305/
There you have it. Gingrich, Santorum, and their pals were wrong. Obama and Brennan were right.
Over the next several months, King and other Republicans escalated the assault on Islam, whipping up hysteria over the “Ground Zero mosque.” Soon, their cause was taken up by Republican presidential candidates. Newt Gingrich led the way, and Rick Santorum followed. “We're fighting a war against radical Islam,” Santorum asserted in a debate on Nov. 22, 2011. In a debate on Jan. 7, 2012, Santorum complained: “This president has sanitized every defense document, everything. There's no—the word ‘radical Islam’ doesn't appear anywhere. Why? Because … we're trying to fight this politically correct war and not being honest with the American public as to who the enemy is.”
Usually, this kind of macho windbaggery can’t be falsified. But this time, Allah was merciful. On May 2, 2011, Obama, in a fit of political correctness, sent a SEAL team to kill Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The SEALs, upon entering Bin Laden’s compound, inexcusably failed to call him a radical Islamist. They did, however, shoot him dead and make off with a haul of al-Qaida documents. Some of these documents have now been declassified, and David Ignatius of the Washington Post has just published the first eyewitness account of them. He writes:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-bin-laden-plot-to-kill-president-obama/2012/03/16/gIQAwN5RGS_story.html
There you have it. Gingrich, Santorum, and their pals were wrong. Obama and Brennan were right. So was George W. Bush in his steadfast refusal to blame Islam for 9/11. Bin Laden wanted a religious war. Bush and Obama refused to let him have it. At the end of his life, isolated by left-wing drone strikes and marked for death by PC commandos, this was Bin Laden’s chief lament. And that, Sen. Santorum, is why you don’t call it a war on radical Islam: because choosing your words carefully is part of winning the war.
MORE:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/03/war_against_islam_bin_laden_s_documents_show_obama_was_right_and_gingrich_and_santorum_were_wrong_.html
The Power of Plutocratic Pettiness
March 18, 2012, 3:26 PM
The Power of Plutocratic Pettiness
Via Rich Yeselson, Alec MacGillis has a fantastic piece in the New Republic (unfortunately paywalled) about how hedge fund managers’ love for Obama has turned into blind, spitting hatred. His main argument is that it’s all about feeling disrespected:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/101726/obama-wall-street-donors-campaign-finance-tax
For all the brashness and bravado that goes with their world, it seems the managers are oddly insecure about their purpose. For years, “most people in the financial service sector were viewed with enormous, out-of-the-box respect and adulation,” says Daley. “These guys were on pedestals, and now that pedestal’s gone, and now, in a lot of people’s minds, the industry doesn’t have that glow, and that bothers them, and now they join that with the president and his theoretically bashing the wealthy. They’ve got to blame somebody, and they blame him because he is representative of that group of people who ‘aren’t us.’” Former Official B told me, “Whether it’s (former Fed Chairman Paul) Volcker saying there’s been no financial innovation worth a shit since the ATM or the president saying his thing, they’re hypersensitive.” Former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank was more scathing: “They don’t just want us to represent their interest, they want to be told that what they do is very good. They want to be honored for what they do for society. And Obama has hurt their feelings. Raising their taxes is not simply a blow to their income. It is a blow to their psychic income, a failure to recognize the enormous good they do for the world.”
And now Obama says what anyone paying attention would: that these big-money people were, to some extent, making their money in socially destructive ways — and they go insane, precisely because in their hearts they know that he’s right.
And because money talks in politics, this pettiness, this display of ego and hurt vanity, may have disastrous consequences.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/the-power-of-plutocratic-pettiness/?smid=tw-NytimesKrugman&seid=auto
Shuster: ‘The Republican Party works for Fox News’ (NOT The Other Way Around)
Shuster told CNN’s Howard Kurtz on Sunday that it only makes sense because “Mitt Romney is the Republican establishment candidate and… Fox News is the Republican establishment.”
“It used to be that Fox News worked for the Republican Party,” the Current TV correspondent observed. “Now the Republican Party works for Fox News.”
“Fox News is convinced that Mitt Romney has a better chance at beating Barack Obama than Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich,” he added. “So, they decided, ‘Look, Mitt Romney is going to be the guy and we think he’s the one to make it the best competitive election.’ And I think, therefore, the coverage naturally becomes more pro-Mitt Romney.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/18/shuster-the-republican-party-works-for-fox-news/
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