Category: News and Opinion

Our National Disgrace

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For the past 30 years, the Republican Party has sought popularity by selling out our collective future and pandering to short-term greed. And the Democratic Party has gone along with this, and done some of it as well, to avoid unpopularity. At first I was increasingly outraged at the direction the country was taking, and the irresponsibility of our so-called leaders. I should have stopped to think about why such pandering always worked. Now I understand that they were merely reflecting the irresponsibility of our people.

This video and this video show the last two national politicians who were willing to say that all of us needed to make sacrifices in the short term, to ensure our well-being and prosperity in the long term. Their points were grounded in the values of their generation, now called the Greatest Generation. They lost their elections, and lost badly, and no Democrat has been willing to defend the future or younger generations ever since. Another member of Greatest Generation in fact took difficult and unpopular steps to secure the future. He is primarily responsible for the pause in the 30-year upward march of debt in the 1990s, as he described in this audio clip, while President. But he didn’t dare to tell Generation Greed that’s what he was going to do beforehand. Instead he lied to get elected. And then was tossed out after four years. And subsequent Republicans have done nothing but double down on pandering to Generation Greed and selling out the future. Click on those links, and really listen to what is being said. How are these men perceived today? As losers. And we are living in the country the winners made.

Waving In The Wind

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President Obama is waving in the wind like an old torn flag one minute slapping down Standard and Poor’s for its bogus downgrading and in another saying let’s all work together as tea bag fringe lunatics like Michele Bachmann who created the debt ceiling crisis blame him for the downgrade without worry of any push back from the White House.

Now A Word From Our Creditors

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China bluntly criticized the US on Saturday one day after the superpower's credit rating was downgraded, saying the "good old days" of borrowing were over. Standard & Poor's cut the U.S. long-term credit rating from top-tier AAA by a notch to AA-plus on Friday over concerns about the nation's budget deficits and climbing debt burden. "The U.S. government has to come to terms with the painful fact that the good old days when it could just borrow its way out of messes of its own making are finally gone," China's official Xinhua news agency said in a commentary.

Those messes aren't the U.S. Government's messes. The mess in the U.S. government is just part of Generation Greed's messes. And they didn’t happen this week. They happened over 30 years.

Walls Closing In Again

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It's getting tough to just keep repeating myself, and what you'll read below is nothing that I haven't said here for years. But I just posted a comment on another blog that I think is worth thinking about for those who haven't been reading my posts in the past. According to The Economist magazine, writing about the terrifying state of the U.S. and world economy, "Barack Obama or one of his Republican challengers may yet discover the courage to tell the truth about the American economy in next year’s presidential election."

My response: So what is the truth? I suspect that if Barack Obama were to tell it, he would be labelled a Socialist. And there is no chance of a Republican candidate telling the truth.  The truth is this… 

Cuomo, The Times and the Non-Profiteers

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Prodded by a New York Times article, it appears that Governor Cuomo is prepared to ask why heads of non-profit organizations — charities in theory — should be paid more than the President of the United States. This represents quite a reversal for, among others, the Times, which had been the mouthpiece of the non-profiteers, uncritically reporting on their "studies," for decades. As I have noted, adjusting for inflation since the last time the President's salary was increased (it tends to be frozen by politics for a long period), that level of pay is $500,000 plus a house. Which is plenty.

Next question: why should public pension funds invest in private companies with employees that are paid imore in guaranteted compensation than the President of the United States, if those companies are unable or unwilling to pay dividends in excess of the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond yield? If the investors have to wait, the executives should have to wait, with some kind of conditional compensation that only pays off years down the road if there is also a payoff for investors.

The Edict of Main Street

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Dear Mr President,  We the people of the United States of America beseech you not to seek reelection; that though you may be a good man we need a leader in these difficult times that will defend the average person and protect the disadvantaged against the ravages of political extremists; that will defend America from its enemies at home and abroad; that will not bow to crank economics no matter how convincing its proponents may be; that will set a standard of inspiration and ma

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