The Free Market Problem

Paul Ryan and his supporters are trying to sell their spending cut and lower tax program and they’re getting booed at town hall meetings.  They’re finally cutting into people’s pockets who can’t defend themselves.  They thought they were doing what their constituency wanted and must be baffled at this negative response. Okay, this might get a bit complicated, but not really.  It just requires a shift in perspective away from the definition of capitalism we’ve been being sold since Reagan to something that is more descriptive of what actually happens.  Theory is all well and good and can be very useful in specific instances, but a one-size-fits-all approach to something as basic as resources is destined to fail. Oh, I’m sorry, let me back up a sec there—fail if your stated goal is to float all boats, to raise the general standard of living, to provide jobs and resources sufficient to sustain a viable community at a decent level.  If, on the other hand, your goal is to feed a machine that generates larger and larger bank accounts for fewer and fewer people at the expense of communities, then by all means keep doing what we’ve been doing. Here’s the basic problem.  People think that the free market and capitalism are one and the same thing.  They are not.  THEY ARE CLOSELY RELATED and both thrive in the presence of the other, but they are not the same thing. But before all that we have to understand one thing---there is no such thing as a Free Market.  None.  Someone always dominates it, controls it, and usually to the detriment of someone else. How is it a free market when one of the most salient features of it is the ability of a small group to determine who will be allowed to participate and at what level?  I’m not talking about the government here, I’m talking about big business, which as standard practice does all it can to eliminate competitors through any means it can get away with and that includes market manipulations that can devalue smaller companies and make them ripe for take-over or force them into bankruptcy.

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Barack Obama ultimately flops in Egypt

In 2009, in Egypt, Barack Obama delivered these words:

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles – principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Well, as Glenn Greenwald reports, the Egyptian people are not happy with Barack Obama or the United states:

It's not hard to see why; the crux of Obama policy -- steadfast support for compliant dictators, endless war-making, blind loyalty to Israeli desires -- is what has long generated intense anti-American sentiment in that part of the world.

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Matt Taibbi introduces Paul Ryan

What does Matt Taibbi think of Paul Ryan?

Paul Ryan, the Republican Party’s latest entrant in the seemingly endless series of young, prickish, over-coiffed, anal-retentive deficit Robespierres they’ve sent to the political center stage in the last decade or so, has come out with his new budget plan. All of these smug little jerks look alike to me – from Ralph Reed to Eric Cantor to Jeb Hensarling to Rand Paul and now to Ryan, they all look like overgrown kids who got nipple-twisted in the halls in high school, worked as Applebee’s shift managers in college, and are now taking revenge on the world as grownups by defunding hospice care and student loans and Sesame Street. They all look like they sleep with their ties on, and keep their feet in dress socks when doing their bi-monthly duty with their wives.
What about Ryan's "bold" plan to balance the budget? Well, it's not entirely about cutting costs. It's also about drastically cutting income: It "includes dropping the top tax rate for rich people from 35 percent to 25 percent. All by itself, that one change means that the government would be collecting over $4 trillion less over the next ten years." Ryan's budget is thus a method of forcing middle class folks to give up valuable benefits so that rich folks can pay less tax. Bill Maher isn't pleased about Ryan's suggestion that he is offering a "cause" rather than a "budget."
No, it’s not a cause, it is a budget, that’s how we should look at it and it’s how we should solve these things. But the problem is that we don’t have one party that stands up to the other side, we have two parties who are agreeing that we should cut from the EPA and people who do the inspections of food and Pell grants and home heating oil for the poor, and nobody is standing up and saying, “No, we should take it from the defense department, from foreign subsidies, from tax cuts for the rich, for corporations like GE that paid no taxes last year.” That’s what’s wrong with our political system.
And one more thing. This cartoon seems to capture another major aspect of the GOP mindset when it comes to balancing the federal budget.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi introduces Paul Ryan

What is it about libertarians?

Ronald Baily of Reason has gathered recent psychological research examining the personality characteristics of libertarians. He notes that Jonathan Haidt has had to revamp his left/right political ideology analysis to accommodate libertarians. They are different from the left and the right. What did Haidt find?

“Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” Haidt et al. write. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on harm and slightly above on fairness. These results suggest that libertarians are “likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

There is a lot of good stuff in this article, including this additional survey of the ways in which they are different than those on the traditional left and right:
Another survey, the Schwartz Value Scale, measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on hedonism, self-direction, and stimulation than either liberals or conservatives, and they put less value than either on benevolence, conformity, security, and tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on power, but like conservatives they have less esteem for universalism. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.” Haidt and his colleagues eventually recognized that their Moral Foundations Questionnaire was blinkered by liberal academic bias, failing to include a sixth moral foundation, liberty. They developed a liberty scale to probe this moral dimension. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that libertarians dramatically outscored liberals and conservatives when it came to putting a high value on both economic and lifestyle liberty. Haidt and his colleagues conclude, “Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.”

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Remarks by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, I recently attended the National Conference on Media Reform in Boston. FCC Commissioner Michael Copps presented at one of the sessions (“The FCC at NCMR: a National Town Hall"). I did not take video of his presentation, but I wanted to share a few things Commissioner Copps had to say. First, I need to note a few things about Michael Copps. He has had a long and illustrious career as FCC Commissioner-- he has taken the job seriously, attempting to use the powers of his office for truly advancing the public good. Perhaps you are thinking that all FCC commissioners should be doing this, but the long history the organization proves otherwise. Copps is extremely for the principled stance is taken if the FCC and for what he has accomplished at the FCC. Consider, for example, Copps’ stance regarding the recently approved merger of Comcast and NBC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Copps In January 18th, 2011 the FCC and the United States Department of Justice allowed Comcast to buy NBC Universal. Michael Copps was the only commissioner of the FCC to vote against the merger. Here’s what he had to say:

I searched in vain for the benefits (...) Pardon me, but a deal of this size should be expected to yield more than the limited benefits cited. (...) In sum, this is simply too much, too big, too powerful, too lacking in benefits for American consumers and citizens.... I would be true to neither the statute nor to everything I have fought for here at the Commission over the past decade if I did not dissent from what I consider to be a damaging and potentially dangerous deal (..) At the end of the day, the public interest requires more-much more-than it is receiving. The Comcast-NBCU joint venture opens the door to the cable-ization of the open Internet. The potential for walled gardens, toll booths, content prioritization, access fees to reach end users, and a stake in the heart of independent content production is now very real.
To put Copps’ stance in perspective, Barack Obama's carefully handpicked Commissioner, Julius Genachowski, and all the other commissioners, voted to approve this hideous merger, leaving Michael Copps standing alone as a matter of principle. Here are some of Copps’ comments at the Boston Media Reform Conference session I attended: - Copps has always believed that government regulation could be a force for public good. - Before Michael Copps joined the FCC, there had never before been a public hearing offered by the FCC. Since he's been a Commissioner, there have been more than 50 public hearings. - Copps has focused on not-inside-the-Beltway issues. - The Republicans are arguing "hands off the Internet," so that the telecoms can control the Internet. This goes to the heart of the future of democracy, and thousands of journalists are "off the beat" on the story. - America is starved for factual news reporting., Yet how many facts are permanently buried, never made known public? We have lots of opinion, but opinions need to be based upon facts. - The resolution of all major issues rides on how they are portrayed by the media. - The Internet is not yet filling the role traditionally fulfilled by newspapers and broadcast networks. Most of the news we still see (90-95%) is produced originally by newspapers and broadcast networks. - We need to bring back licensing regimens for the public interest is invited and it controls the renewals of station licenses. This would encourage broadcasters to talk to people about what to cover. It would help keep minorities from being stereotyped. - In the 1930s, a quid pro quo was reached. The airwaves belong to the people of the United States, and stations are offered licenses to use those airwaves and they must use them to cover the public interest. - Citizen action can still work, even though a small number of people in the United States hold vast economic and political power, and even though their money has immense influence. - Copps is concerned about net neutrality in the short term. "There's lots of room to do mischief." He further noted that wireless is not included in the regulations that have been issued by the FCC. Long-term, he is even more worried. New technologies always end up getting controlled by corporate interests. The FCC has issued regulations with which he has called the Internet and "information service" under the 1996 Communications Act, rather than designating the Internet a "telecommunications service." No other country in the world has gone down this road. What this means is that the FCC is not going to take charge to make sure that net neutrality is enforced. - “We need to recommit ourselves to reforming the media, of, by and for the American people.”

Continue ReadingRemarks by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps