Day: September 22, 2008

Professor Classroom

It is Monday and yet another quiz to tease the mind.  A little stimulation is always good for the soul, if you get the answer it is a mental orgasm.  Today’s quiz is a bit humorous in a way…I cannot see anyone these days actually doing this.

What are the funds paid to the government, to the public treasury, by persons who feel that they may have cheated the government in their tax payments?

Yes, Irene, there is a name for such an action.

This may have been done in the past, but there is NO way it would be done today.

Palin’s Alaskan Rape Kit Policy

THis is from an Alaskan blogger Shannyn Moore:

Mountains of controversy are swirling around Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s strange policy of forcing rape victims to pay for their own rape kits while she was mayor of the now-infamous town of Wasilla.

The most interesting take I’ve found is posted by Alaska blogger Shannyn Moore who relates the following:

I sat with a rape victim during the “harvesting of evidence”. Mascara smeared eyes stared blankly out from a cave of shame. “We’ve got swimmers,” announced the forensic tech in the lab next door. My friend didn’t look surprised. In her 60’s, she was still asked if she felt the need for emergency contraception. Surviving the process would have only been compounded and made worse with an itemized bill; victimized twice courtesy of Sarah Palin and the city of Wasilla.

Much can be learned about the Palin Administration’s family values from reviewing their spending priorities. Former Chief of Police Irl Stambaugh included forensic rape kits (up to $1,200 per kit) in his budget requests. He was fired by Palin in 1997. In her termination letter, Palin wrote, “…I do not feel I have your full support in my efforts to govern the city of Wasilla. Therefore I intend to terminate your employment… ” Staumbaugh headed the police department since it was created in 1993. Before that, he served 22 years with the Anchorage Police Department rising to the rank of captain. Sarah Palin hired Charlie Fannon as the new Wasilla Chief of Police and said it was one of her best decisions as mayor. Fannon eliminated the forensic rape kits from the budget. Though the number of rapes weren’t reported, Fannon claimed it would save Wasilla taxpayers $5,000 to $14,000 a year.

Palin supporters ought to be taking a much closer look at her record on these types of issues (charging rape victims for evidentiary examinations so their attackers can be brought to trial) than whether she can juggle five children and the vice presidency. This, more than anything, should push women, pro-life and pro-choice, away from the McCain-Palin ticket. It’s one thing to oppose abortion on moral grounds. It’s quite another to charge crime victims for their own forensic examinations. Such a policy is nothing short of outrageous.

Is It Socialistic?

During the past several months along the road to the White House, I have heard programs offered by Clinton and Obama as socialistic or as socialism, but are they really? The quick answer is NO. But I know all want to know why I say this. The term is used for the Boomer generation, for it has some residual fear reaction left to it. But as far as the younger generations, they would not know socialism if it walked up and bit them in the ass. Basically calling something ‘socialistic’ is a tired old tactic which needs to be retired and politicians and surrogates need to address the real problems faced by the people, most of all, problems of the working class.

But wait! The interventions by the Federal Reserve, and the US treasury department have been dramatic and unprecedented in many ways. Against hysterical and ignorant criticism from the free-marketers in their own party, Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson appear to have drawn the correct conclusions, albeit some years after the they were due – that a measure of socialism is the only, repeat only, course that can avert catastrophe. The only question is: will it be enough socialism to stay the dragon of world-wide depression and the fires of war that would surely follow in its wake?

Bernake and Paulson have clearly been reading Hyman Minsky and and Charles Kindleberger – latter day closet Marxians and “long wavers” – and they GET IT: When markets fail, the chaos that follows is NOT self-correcting, and governments MUST act. This is a profound fact that neo-classical economic training – which pays virtually no attention to history – tends to ignore; thus many, but fortunately not all, economists simply cannot believe the scale of the dangers at hand, nor do they have the intellectual or scientific tools to evaluate them. I do not argue that mathematical models are not important, even mandatory in developing economic and social policy. But seeing the big picture requires careful attention to economic history, which gives abundant evidence that raw capitalism is NOT a stable system.

Recent history gives solid examples of how smart socialization is the only corrective. Sweden, for example, confronted financial collapse in the 1990’s by nationalizing its banks and absorbing the toxic bubble before selling the institutions back in a more carefully regulated environment, and sustained growth was the result. Japan, on the other hand, allowed its real estate market to collapse without intervention 20 years ago, and they have not recovered growth rates since.

Call it what you want, but when the government takes over the running of a company or industry, it is SOCIALISM! Sorry, critics but you cannot blame the Left for this…….it is a situation of your own making.

Bailout: Info Ink Op-Ed

If the cataclysmic events in the financial markets over the past week have revealed anything, it is the complete subservience of every branch of the US government and both major political parties to the banks and the biggest capitalist interests. Behind the façade of American democracy lies a dictatorship of finance capital that, under conditions of crisis, exerts its power directly and nakedly.

Thus, in the course of two weeks, the Federal government has doled out hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money in bailouts and loans for failing financial institutions. It has carried out the unprecedented nationalization of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG) with what is widely seen as a down payment of $85 billion. The firm holds nearly half a trillion dollars worth of questionable credit derivatives on its books.

Not a single vote was taken in either house of the US Congress on these measures, much less by the American people. Rather, the bailouts of Bear Stearns and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, like the takeover of AIG, have all been negotiated behind closed doors between Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke and Wall Street executives.

One thing is certain, the plans to rescue Wall Street that are now being prepared with Democratic support will be paid for by working people, through the destruction of their jobs and living standards and the gutting of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and what little else remains of social benefits in America.

How do you like it now?

Many Whites Hold Racist Views

Best I can say after this is …..”Ya Think?”

One-third of white Democrats harbor negative views of black people, calling them “lazy,” “violent” and responsible for their own troubles, a new poll has found.

Such racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to the AP-Yahoo News poll.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 – about 2.5 percentage points.

The poll found that more than a third of all white Democrats and independent voters, who Obama can’t win the White House without, agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks.

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word ‘violent’ strongly applied.

Among other words, 22 percent agreed with “boastful,” 29 percent “complaining,” 13 percent “lazy” and 11 percent “irresponsible.”

When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

If any of this surprises you, then you do not live in the South.  If this poll had been taken only in the South then I believe the numbers and adjectives would have been greater.  Muych progress has been made in the South, but there is a long way to go.

Today In Labor History

22 September

Emancipation Proclamation – 1862

Great Steel Strike begins; 350,000 workers demand union recognition. The AFL Iron and Steel Organizing Committee calls off the strike, their goal unmet, 108 days later – 1919

Martial law rescinded in Mingo County, W. Va. after police, U.S. troops and hired goons finally quell coal miners’ strike – 1922

U.S. Steel announces it will cut the wages of 220,000 workers by 10 percent – 1931

United Textile Workers strike committee order strikers back to work after 22 days out, ending what was at that point the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor. The strike involved some 400,000 workers in New England, the mid-Atlantic states and the South – 1934

Some 400,000 coal miners strike for higher wages in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and Ohio – 1935

The AFL expels the International Longshoremen’s Association for racketeering; the union was readmitted to the then-AFL-CIO six years later – 1953

OSHA reaches its largest ever settlement agreement, $21 million, with BP Products North America following an explosion at BP’s Texas City, Texas plant earlier in the year that killed 15 and injured 170 – 2005

Eleven Domino’s employees in Pensacola, Fla. form the nation’s first union of pizza delivery drivers – 2006

San Francisco hotel workers end a two-year contract fight, ratify a new five-year pact with their employers – 2006

Foreign Banks Get A Piece Of The Pie

In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.

The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s “This Week,” telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is “a distinction without a difference to the American people.”

“If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution,” Paulson said.

“That’s a distinction without a difference to the American people. The key here is protecting the system. … We have a global financial system, and we are talking very aggressively with other countries around the world and encouraging them to do similar things, and I believe a number of them will. But, remember, this is about protecting the American people and protecting the taxpayers. and the American people don’t care who owns the financial institution. If the financial institution in this country has problems, it’ll have the same impact whether it’s the U.S. or foreign.”

House Democrats plan to insist on adding protections for homeowners facing foreclosure. They also want to add a measure to help homeowners facing bankruptcy and an executive compensation restriction designed to prevent golden parachutes for the heads of troubled institutions.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was supportive of the bailout concept in a statement released Friday, believes that “whatever gets done in Congress has to protect Main Street,” senior adviser Stephanie Cutter said on MSNBC on Saturday.

On “Fox News Sunday,” Paulson told Chris Wallace that he would resist the Democrats’ desired limits on executive compensation.

As written on the Politic website.

Economists In Doubt

The bailout post has gotten so much play I thought I would pass on what economist think of the deal.

Many of the same economists and opinion-makers who’d provided a bipartisan sheen of consensus to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson‘s  previous moves have quickly begun casting doubts on the wisdom of a policy that would allow Treasury to purchase without oversight hundreds of billions of dollars of difficult-to-price assets from financial institutions.

Under the proposal, Paulson would not have to report to Congress until December, and the only safeguard for taxpayers was a provision that the “Secretary shall take into consideration means for — (1) providing stability or preventing disruption to the financial markets or banking system; and (2) protecting the taxpayer.”

Skepticism toward the plan reflected more than the predictable desires of the left to spread the wealth to Main Street or of the right to reject government bailouts, although those sentiments were also expressed.

Former Clinton Secretary of Labor and informal Obama advisor Robert Reich, writing in Politico’s Arena forum, added that “[I]f you are a member of Congress, you just might be in a position to demand from Wall Street certain conditions in return for the blank check,” and suggested that the government take an equity stake in financial institutions, provide homeowner relief, and instill the outlines of a new regulatory regime.

“Wall Streeters may not like these conditions,” Reich went on. “Well, you should tell them that the public doesn’t like the idea of bailing out Wall Street.”