Socialism for the Rich

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

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Chris Hedges on "Empire of Illusion"

Celebrity worship banishes reality. And this adulation is pervasive. It is dressed up in the language of the Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people like Pat Robertson or Joel Olsteen, the aura of stardom, fame and celebrity power. These Christian celebrities travel in private jets and limousines. They are surrounded by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience, and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal fortunes.

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Illusion-Literacy-Triumph-Spectacle/dp/1568584377

Wednesday, December 15, 2010