100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Glenn Greenwald explains why defending human rights and the Constitution wins hearts and minds and is the most American thing you can do.

Dean Baker explains a plan to save jobs that involves the government reimbursing employers so their employees can have more time off. Can’t be done? They already do it in Germany.

Estimated number of Al Qaeda members now operating in Afghanistan, according to the U.S. national security adviser: 100 (one hundred)
(Haper’s Index, December 2009)

General Wesley Clark thinks we should get out of Afghanistan.

“Last week, ExxonMobil became the first U.S. oil company in 35 years to sign an oil-production contract with the government of Iraq,” reports Antonia Juhasz.

The most important regulatory reform is to fire the regulators who were out to lunch – starting with Ben Bernanke – thereby allowing this economic disaster. If we don’t fire the people that blew it, then we give the regulators no incentive to get it right next time. This is what basic economics tells us.

…

We got into this crisis because of a serious failure of the regulators and, more importantly, the economics profession. The failure to come to grips with this reality both means that much of the regulatory reform effort will be misdirected and that we will have done little to prevent the next crisis.

The central problem, which we should force every regulator to say 10,000 times, is that the US had a huge housing bubble. The existence of an $8 trillion bubble guaranteed a severe economic downturn when it burst. This would have been true even if there were no dodgy subprime mortgages, exotic collaterised debt obligations, credit default swaps or over-leveraged investment banks.

- Dean Baker, Regulating the regulators

While we may need additional revenue at some point, it makes far more sense to impose a financial transactions tax, which would primarily hit the Wall Street banks that gave us this disaster, than to tax the consumption of ordinary working families. We can raise large amounts of money by taxing the speculation of the Wall Street high-flyers while barely affecting the sort of financial dealings that most of us do in our daily lives.

via Making Wall Street Pay by Dean Baker | CommonDreams.org.

A few books arrived from Amazon yesterday that I’m looking forward to getting into: It Takes a Pillage: behind the bailouts, bonuses, and backroom deals from Washington to Wall Street by Nomi Prins, Plunder and Blunder: the rise and fall of the bubble economy by Dean Baker, and The Great Financial Crisis: causes and consequences by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff.

When it comes to historical events like a Second Great Bank Depression (as Prins puts it), I have followed it here and there in the news but I’d rather wait for people I trust to do the research necessary to understand what’s happening. That’s what I figure I pay for when I buy books like these. Like so many things, sure, I could do it myself, which is a great concept in general. But what you can’t do yourself is everything.

I own a house with my wife. Some work needed to be done on it. Sure, I could do it myself — and do it wrong. And then do it myself again — and have it be imperfect. Imperfect is fine with me when it comes to creativity or drafts of writing. Not so when it comes to my roof or a kitchen floor. No thanks, I will pay the money. I figure it’s more efficient for me to work the job I have and then use that money to pay someone to do this other work quickly and correctly — rather than me take on a part-time job known as “home improvement” — a job I’m not all that interested in. Isn’t that what this capitalism thing was supposed to be about?

On the other hand, having people do it for you can also have it’s consequences, which brings me back to the books I bought. Forty pages in to Pillage I’m reminded how much of a mess the so-called experts made of the financial crisis. In a nutshell, something really did need to be done in order to not let our financial system literally crash (e.g. you go to the ATM — no money; your credit card doesn’t work; you don’t get a paycheck, etc.), but what was done simply transferred vast amounts of wealth from tax payers to financial failures who view themselves now as “survivors” even though it was our taxes that allowed them to survive. Worse yet, the bozos who received the money caused the problems. Even more worse the government employees empowered to fix this mess are buddies with the people who created it.

I heard Andrew Ross Sorkin on Fresh Air the other day. He seemed to want to stress that he’s not an apologist for people like Henry Paulson, but he sure sounded like it. Terry Gross and Sorkin got caught up in the same old canard: well, did he mean to let Goldman Sachs survive? Well, of course he did! But Sorkin pussy-foots it and suggests that maybe unconsciously he did but consciously he didn’t. Well, he certainly consciously was not interested in helping regular people by providing banks with incentives to help people work out their mortgage situations rather than foreclose on them.

I bring up Sorkin, because he too has a book out on the financial crisis. And because he’s a New York Times journalist, therefore he obviously must be very important to listen to. But, I’m skipping him and sticking with my mavericks above.

I forgot to mention that Magdoff and Foster are involved with the publication Monthly Review (I think they’re the editors?) which is a — wait for it… SOCIALIST publication! [insert scream here] (Speaking of screaming, have you become a graphic novel reading zombie hooked on The Walking Dead series? *Uggghh* …  I have)

Interesting & Related Links

Dean Baker on Fresh Air

Dean Baker and Nomi Prins on GritTv

Nomi Prins

Monthly Review

Allison Kilkenny: Wall Street celebrates bonuses, schools beg for supplies

…In the U.S. economy, a 5 percent reduction in average work hours could save roughly 7 million jobs.

via Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect.

I know what you’re thinking: “But I love my job! If I could I would work 5% more hours and have 5% less time to live my life, I would be so much happier!”

In one finding, 75 percent of respondents said they were concerned that the cost of their own health care would eventually go up if the government did not create a system of providing health care for all Americans. But in another finding, 77 percent said they were concerned that the cost of health care would go up if the government did create such a system.

via New Poll Finds Growing Unease on Health Plan – NYTimes.com

That’s the last paragraph of the article. Obviously, people have no idea what to think about health care reform. Partly because no one has produced any details about it. And partly because the insurance industry is spending millions of dollars on propaganda to convince people that reforming health care will eliminate your choice of doctor (nevermind the 47 million people with no insurance and therefore no doctor) and increase your health care costs. How adding a public option could increase your private insurance is a mystery, probably because it doesn’t make any sense. If the government provides an option, it will create competition for the private  insurance industries who will be forced to lower costs.

As far as health care being “too expensive”, this is simply not true. Dean Baker points out the following in his Beat the Press blog in this post titled, NPR Wonders Why Public Support for a Health Care Plan With a “Huge” Cost is Slipping:

The program’s huge price tag is equal to about 0.5 percent of projected GDP over the next decade. The Iraq war at its peak cost more than 1.0 percent of GDP. NPR and other news outlets rarely, if ever, referred to the “huge” cost of this war, which was twice the “huge” cost of President Obama’s health care program. Perhaps the decision of supposedly neutral media sources to constantly warn that the costs of the program are “huge” has something to do with its dwindling public support.

Dean Baker puts pharmaceutical generosity in perspective:

How Generous Is the Pharmaceutical Industry?

Readers might be wondering that after hearing the pharmaceutical industry is pledging itself to $80 billion in savings on drug prices over the next decade. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services the country will spend more than $3.5 trillion on drugs over the next decade. This means that the drug industry’s offer is equal to a bit more than 2 cents for every dollar of revenue. By contrast, if drugs sold in a competitive market, without patent monopolies, the savings would probably be more than $3 trillion.

–Dean Baker

New York City has been constructing a park in the sky. What used to be a structure for freight trains that would run overhead has now been transformed into The High Line.

The Beatles catalog has been remastered.

Dean Baker reminds us that anyone who did as bad a job as The Federal Reserve (e.g. causing 10 million people to lose their job) would be fired.

Glenn Greenwald discusses the depressing fact that Attorney General Eric Holder will only be investigating low-level interrogators instead of the authors and enablers of the torture memos. And in an unrelated update at the end of this post Greenwald reiterates:

last month, the Obama White House adopted the Bush/Cheney view of White House secrecy to insist on its right to conceal the identity of coal executives visiting the White House to discuss clean air policies. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent today notes that the Obama White House is now doing something similar but worse: namely, refusing to disclose the list of health care industry executives with whom White House officials have been meeting to discuss health care policy — even as Obama’s vows of “White House transparency” remain on the White House website.

Readers might be asking that question when the NYT told them that CBO’s analysis implied that the House’s health care bill would raise the deficit by that amount. It is equal to about 0.13 percent of projected GDP over this period.

By comparison, the Iraq War at its peak cost more than 1.0 percent of GDP. Put in per capita terms, it is a bit less than $80 a year. This would have been useful context for this article.

via Beat the Press Archive | The American Prospect.