This has been a long time coming in a candidate. Elizabeth Warren has a long track record for being hard-working, smart and incorruptible. Is there some way to clone her? Just listen to her eloquent rebuff to the Tea Party and her diagnosis of what ails us financially. Does anyone really disagree with any of this?
Bill Maher puts the income disparity of the United States into perspective:
Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell worked overtime keeping up with the arguments of "drown government in a bathtub" Grover Norquist. Interesting, how Rendell admits many points of agreement with Norquist, yet Norquist can't summon up the courage to admit any points of agreement with Rendell. This unwillingness to engage has come to be one of the most salient badges of modern conservatism. I agree with Norquist that there are many questionable government expenditures, state and federal. But who would disagree with this? The question then becomes "What are we going to do going forward?" Rendell agrees that that there are wasteful expenditures and that we need identify them and cut them, but asserts that there are many projects deserving the investment of tax dollars because society will be much better off with government making these valuable investments that would not be supported by private profit-taking. Norquist displays an extremely narrow view of the appropriate role for government. He detests mass transit, though he tolerates road construction. He displays no sympathy for poor or working people who depend on mass transit. He sees all public union pensions as wasteful (regardless of the fact that many public employees have historically taken a hit in annual salary with the expectation that this deficit would be made up in their pension plan). He detests environmentalists, without displaying any acknowledgment that their goals are at least sometimes laudable. He argues that because corruption and "free riders" are inherent to the existence of government, we should throw out the baby with the bathwater. Norquist argues (at 5 min. mark) that there are only two metrics of economic growth: A) economic growth (= per capita income) and B) the "size of government" (= government spending as a percentage of GDP). Entirely lacking from his world view is any measure of quality of life. That subterranean rift divides Norquist's view from my own. I believe that we need to take into account a moral obligation to maintain a quality of life that assumes that not all Americans can afford the basic human necessities that they deserve (e.g., a basic level of health care), and that these things should be considered by our government to be basic human rights. This is the first time I've seen Norquist speak. I can sense his Ayn Randian free market fundamentalism, even though it wasn't explored openly in this video. Instead, that dark id that drives him along is the man hiding behind the curtain labelled simply ("No Taxation!"). Norquist's conversation with Governor Rendell (who is a well-informed and proficient public speaker) is a civil and informative conversation that allowed me to better understand the various ways in which I occasionally agree, but mostly disagree with Norquist's viewpoint. Video streaming by Ustream
As reported by Common Dreams:
The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the U.S. has sunk to 25th in a global ranking of Internet speeds, just behind Romania. Why? Because our nation's regulators abandoned an earlier commitment to foster competition in the marketplace for Internet access providers.Here's the problem: Most households in the United States have little-to-no choice when it comes to land line broadband:
The lack of competition has turned America into a broadband backwater. In the aftermath of the FCC’s decisions, powerful phone and cable companies legislated and lobbied their way to controlling 97 percent of the fixed-line residential broadband market — leaving the vast majority of consumers with two or fewer choices of land-based providers in any given market.
This article links to a Free Press publication, "Dismantling Digital Deregulation: Toward a national Broadband Strategy," which tells us what deregulation has brought us:Almost right out of the gate, the Bush administration’s FCC declared war on competitive ISPs. It quickly decided that even though the cable platform had transformed into a two-way communications medium, cable companies didn’t need to abide by any of the pro-competitive requirements of the 1996 Act. The FCC also decided that incumbent monopoly phone companies would no longer be required to provide competitive broadband ISPs wholesale access at reasonable rates and conditions. This abandonment of “open access” policy flew in the face of congressional intent and doomed the competitive ISPs to irrelevancy and bankruptcy. Meanwhile, overseas, other countries maintained this commitment to competition and reaped the benefits. The OECD countries with open access policies have broadband penetration levels nearly twice that of countries without these policies. Citizens in the countries with open access policies also get more broadband bang for their buck. For example, consumers in countries with “line sharing” open access policies pay about $14 per Mbps; consumers in countries without these policies pay more than double this amount. The FCC, in its blind pursuit of deregulation, abandoned line sharing and other open access policies in the hopes that this “regulatory relief” would inspire incumbents to make massive investments in broadband infrastructure. But this hope, based in part on the promises made by the incumbents to get favorable FCC treatment, turned out to be completely false. An examination of the data reveals that the pace of broadband deployment was no different in the years before major FCC broadband deregulation than it was in the years after. States like Virginia and Maine saw no improvement in deployment, while in some states like Nebraska, things actually got worse. The FCC also justified its abandonment of competition policy by arguing that the incumbent phone and cable companies would offer third-party ISPs wholesale access on favorable terms, even though they weren't obligated to do so. In retrospect, letting the fox guard the henhouse was a colossal mistake. An examination of the offerings of the few remaining third-party broadband ISPs illustrates the obvious: that incumbents have absolutely no reason to offer their competitors favorable wholesale rates. For example, Earthlink still resells Time Warner Cable broadband service, but the monthly rate is so high that no consumer in his or her right mind would pay it. Earthlink’s 7 Mbps tier costs consumers nearly $30 more than if they bought it from Time Warner Cable directly, while the lowest-price tier is nearly 20 percent cheaper if purchased from Time Warner Cable. In many cases, once they were granted relief from providing reasonable wholesale access, incumbents refused to offer wholesale altogether or jacked up the rates so high that third-party ISPs would lose money.
Swiss bank UBS recently announced that a "rogue trader" caused the bank to lose $2 billion. At Common Dreams, Matt Taibbi argues that what this "rogue trader" was doing was par for the course on Wall Street, even since the intentional destruction of the Glass-Steagall Act. Therefore, allegations that "rogue traders" cause losses at Wall Street banks is yet another fraud on behalf of these "banks."
Investment bankers do not see it as their jobs to tend to the dreary business of making sure Ma and Pa Main Street get their $8.03 in savings account interest every month. Nothing about traditional commercial banking – historically, the dullest of businesses, taking customer deposits and making conservative investments with them in search of a percentage point of profit here and there – turns them on. . . . Nonetheless, thanks to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed in 1998 with the help of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, Bill Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm and a host of other short-sighted politicians, we now have a situation where trillions in federally-insured commercial bank deposits have been wedded at the end of a shotgun to exactly such career investment bankers from places like Salomon Brothers (now part of Citi), Merrill Lynch (Bank of America), Bear Stearns (Chase), and so on. These marriages have been a disaster. The influx of i-banking types into the once-boring worlds of commercial bank accounts, home mortgages, and consumer credit has helped turn every part of the financial universe into a casino. That’s why I can’t stand the term "rogue trader," which is always tossed out there when some investment-banker asshole loses a billion dollars betting with someone else’s money. They’re not "rogue" for the simple reason that making insanely irresponsible decisions with other peoples’ money is exactly the job description of a lot of people on Wall Street. Hell, they don’t call these guys "rogue traders" when they make a billion dollars gambling.Reckless Wall Street "banks" are mostly not-banks. They only make about 15% of their money raising capital for businesses. Instead, they are gamblers who are using what's left of their bank function as a human shield so that when their reckless bets go bad they can call out to Congress for yet another mega-wad of cash to save them from going under. You can almost hear them shouting, "Save the banks! Save the banks!" If the federal government hadn't killed Glass-Steagall, Congress would be much better situated to respond to what would have been only a reckless gambler, "Sorry, but it's time you suffered the natural consequences of your actions . . . no federal money for you." If only Glass-Steagall were still in place, those stodgy and boring bank accounts of people like you and me would be safely segregated from the uncontrolled avarice of huge gambling corporations that currently call themselves "banks."