Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The New Colossus





















Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she|
wth silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Emma Lazarus 1883



http://www.libertystatepark.com/emma.htm

Private Prison Industry & Arizona Immigration Law


Before Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/deporting-us-citizens-name-compassion went on to champion what would become the state's controversial immigration bill, he held a closed-door meeting with state legislators and corporate executives at a Washington hotel. At this meeting, the 50 or so people in the room—all members of the "conservative, free-market orientated, limited-government" American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Home—drafted and unanimously voted on model legislation that would become "almost word for word, Arizona's immigration law." According to an NPR investigation , several representatives of the country's largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America http://www.correctionscorp.com/, were among them. Over the past several months, NPR scoured campaign finance reports, corporate records and lobbying documents to gauge how deeply the private prison industry was involved in passing Arizona's immigration bill.

http://slatest.slate.com/id/2272725/entry/1/

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/straight-out-right-wing-playbook


Corporations

The Reagan Ruins


The Reagan Ruins

Robert Borosage's picture

The celebration of Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday doesn't come until early March, but the devotions have been going on for years. For conservatives, Reagan is the lodestar, the genial demigod to whom all must avow fealty. In a Time cover story, Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy suggest that Obama considers Reagan "The Role Model." Richard Norton Smith, writing about the "Reagan Revelation," attributes Obama's uptick in the polls because he's been "acting positively Reaganesque," reaching out to the business community, scoring bipartisan victories on tax cuts, delivering a sermon in Tucson that Smith calls "worthy of the Great Communicator at his most consoling."





http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011020501/reagan-ruins

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Low-wage conservatism


MINIMUM WAGE FOLLIES....I promised myself I wasn't going to read George Will's column today about abolishing the minimum wage, but unfortunately a reader sent me the link and I clicked on it before I knew what it was. Weak man that I am, I then went ahead and plowed through it.
It's mostly just a data dump of half facts and cherry picked numbers, and the only assertion of any importance comes at the end:
The minimum wage should be the same everywhere: $0. Labor is a commodity; governments make messes when they decree commodities' prices.
This, in a nutshell, is the core problem with conservative economics: it views workers as commodities. Naturally it follows from this that we should be free to treat workers like commodities, rather than as human beings.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_01/010514.php

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Anti-Regulators Are the 'Job Killers'

Deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization (the three "des") created the criminogenic environment that drove the modern U.S. financial crises. The three "des" were essential to create the epidemics of accounting control fraud that hyper-inflated the bubble that triggered the Great Recession. "Job killing" is a combination of two factors -- increased job losses and decreased job creation. I'll focus solely on private sector jobs -- but the recession has also been devastating in terms of the loss of state and local governmental jobs.


Anti-Regulators are the job-killers

Corporations