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Gerber daisy. (Photo by joanneleon. September, 2012)
LEHRER: Governor, what about Simpson-Bowles? Do you support Simpson-Bowles?
ROMNEY: Simpson-Bowles, the president should have grabbed that.
LEHRER: No, I mean, do you support Simpson-Bowles?
ROMNEY: I have my own plan. It's not the same as Simpson- Bowles. But in my view, the president should have grabbed it. If you wanted to make some adjustments to it, take it, go to Congress, fight for it.
OBAMA: That's what we've done, made some adjustments to it, and we're putting it forward before Congress right now, a $4 trillion plan ...
~ Presidential debate, 10/3/12
News and Opinion
Zombie catfood commission. We told you.
Simpson-Bowles make their comeback
Simpson and Bowles are having another national moment.
Fifty-eight million Americans saw President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney tangle over former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles’s deficit reduction plan. “Simpson-Bowles” was the most popular Google search during the 90-minute debate.
[ ... ]
But behind the scenes, the two deficit hawks are enjoying more than just a search engine moment. The pair is heading to Virginia’s Mount Vernon next week to meet with the new bipartisan Senate “Gang of Eight” in an effort to hash out a major deficit and tax package.
Inside the Capitol, there’s an increasing recognition that any major deficit deal will at least need the imprimatur of Simpson and Bowles in order to win over votes from both sides of the aisle.
[Emphasis added]
While Social Security did not contribute a dime to the deficit, this is how NBC spins it and this is why your leaders keep putting it on the table. They don't want to pay back the trillions in Social Security contributions -- want to effectively steal some of the payroll deductions that people paid in for decades and break the social contract.
Debate focuses attention on what Social Security 'tweak' might mean for workers
And the $2.7 trillion in Treasury bonds which Social Security holds as assets are also future taxpayers’ liabilities. In the coming decades those bonds will need to be paid off by taxpayers, placing a strain on the entire budget since every dollar which goes to redeeming the bonds is a dollar which cannot go to national parks or Pell grants to needy students – or to Big Bird (public broadcasting).
Jobs Numbers Show This Is Not The Time For Austerity
The September jobs report is more of the same. We witness slow growth, with job creation barely at levels needed to keep up with workforce growth. And the economy is headed into ever more severe headwinds – Europe’s recession is already reflected in manufacturing job stagnation; the congressionally invented "fiscal cliff" at end of year will soon slow hiring by government contractors.
Austerity has worsened Greek crisis
AN influential group of international banks and insurers has attacked political leaders in Europe over their handling of the Greek crisis, arguing that the single-minded pursuit of austerity has made the situation worse.
The Institute of International Finance, which last year brokered a deal between Greece and international bond investors to halve Greece’s private debts, said politicians are playing a dangerous game putting their desire for debt reduction ahead of coordinated efforts to spur growth.
Charles Dallara, the institute’s chairman, said the world’s major economies needed to coordinate their efforts or risk persistent instability and low growth.
Anti-drone protest held in Pakistan
Cheering crowds lined the road on Saturday to greet Khan, scattering rose petals and heating drums as the convoy of more than 100 vehicles embarked on the 44-kilometre drive from the capital Islamabad to South Waziristan.
Khan and his supporters are calling for the US to stop targeting Pakistan's northwest territories.
But as night fell, it appeared increasingly unlikely the protesters would be allowed to reach their destination, considered a Taliban and al-Qaeda stronghold, and often called the most dangerous place on earth.
The government says the Taliban plan to attack the rally. Authorities told the AFP news agency it was not safe for Khan to enter the semi-autonomous tribal belt and television broadcast footage of shipping containers closing the road into South Waziristan.
"I condemn the hypocrisy of the government, who tried their best to make this march fail," Khan told around 5,000 supporters at a brief halt on the outskirts of the Punjab town of Mianwali, his former parliamenta
National Bank of Canada foreclosing Americans’ homes over credit card debt
Bay Citizen reporter Rick Jurgens writes that the bank’s debt collection unit, Credigy Receivables, began filing foreclosure lawsuits recently that take advantage of a loophole in California’s laws that lets them go directly for a debtor’s home even if that property was not offered as collateral for a loan.
Jurgens explained that one of the people targeted by the new legal tactic is 71-year-old Helen Jones, an Oakland resident who lived in her home for 37 years before Credigy sued in 2010 over $1,636 in credit card debt her ex-husband ran up. She claimed the bank offered to settle the debt and drop the foreclosure for $7,000, and that she ultimately paid them $3,800 just to get it all over with.
They can get away with this because California has left the relatively new practice of third parties buying and selling debts virtually unregulated, creating legal space that lets banks go directly after valuable assets that were never offered as security for loans.
2 U.S. troops, 2 Afghan policemen killed
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Insurgents on Saturday killed two American troops in eastern Afghanistan, an area that has seen heavy fighting in recent months, the U.S. military said.
No other information about the deaths was disclosed, pending notification of family members.
But a U.S. military official said two U.S. special operations forces were killed by small arms fire in Wardak province, southwest of Kabul.
Navy SEALs serve as buffer between Afghans and Taliban
As NATO forces wind down their conventional troops, now down to about half of the 100,000 number of a year ago, the Pentagon believes that the most elite soldiers in the coalition will need to remain beyond the complete withdrawal scheduled for the end of 2014 to prevent a rollback.
"Nothing is absolute, but we anticipate being here for the long haul," says SOJTF-A spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Harrell, emphasizing that a longer-term presence of special operations forces "must first be discussed with the Afghan government."
U.S. special operations troops in Afghanistan include SEALs, the Army's Green Berets and other highly trained units. The use of special operations forces has been a contentious issue for Afghan leaders, who in recent years have been critical of "night raids," which Afghans say result in many civilian casualties.
We've Had Austerity Lite Whether We Want To Admit It Or Not
I've been detecting quite a bit of smug, self aggrandizement coming from certain Democratic quarters about the brilliance of the stimulus and how it deftly avoided all the problems that Europe and the UK are facing with their harsh austerity programs. It's a nice story and there's no doubt that the US dodged the UK bullet but there's no doubt that the administration has not only been talking up austerity since they came into office, they've actually enacted it.
From David Dayen in August:
Yes, Michael Grunwald, There Has Been Short-Term Austerity
This is simply not true. I’m sure it must be comforting to Grunwald to think it is. But it’s not. The best expression of the austerity that has been implemented at the federal level for the last two years can be found in this chart from Goldman Sachs. It shows pretty clearly that fiscal policy at the federal level turned negative in mid-2010. This doesn’t just mean that fiscal policy, after the stimulus began to run out, was relatively speaking less powerful. It means that federal fiscal policy, not combined with state and local but just confined to the federal level, dragged on growth starting in mid-2010, before the 2010 midterm elections. It really never recovered, save for a couple quarters of near-zero growth from fiscal policy in the middle of 2011.
And there are policies that correspond to this. The White House froze federal employee pay; it was one of the first items touted from their budget in 2010. They cut food stamps twice to pay for other priorities. They cut unemployment benefits in the most recent extension, so that the 99-week benefit has been reduced to 73. They cut $39 billion from the 2012 budget and imposed a spending cap for the next ten years. The Administration will tell you proudly that they have inaugurated the lowest rate of discretionary spending since the Eisenhower era.
To just ignore these efforts at short-term austerity and say they did not exist is really a fallacy.
Did Obama Blame the Financial Crisis on Budget Deficits?
The Bush tax cuts were very bad fiscal policy, and shifted wealth upwards. But budget deficits create public debt, and the 2007-2009 financial crisis was fundamentally a problem of excessive private debt. Conflating the two is an intentional strategy to impose austerity on a population. White House Fiscal Commission co-Chair Alan Simpson has pointed to Greece as a possible future for the US, if the US doesn’t begin reducing its deficit. Bowles and Simpson argue that our budget deficit is heading us towards “the most predictable economic crisis in history”. In fact, the budget deficit basically exploded because of reduced output due to the financial crisis, and the transfer of private debt to the public balance sheet.
There are many narratives of why the financial crisis happened. The only credible narrative, though, starts with banks and hedge funds manipulating the capital markets to push capital into junk mortgages. There’s a lot more than that, of course, going back to deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s, and a creation of an increasingly national credit and mortgage market in the 1990s (thanks to Clinton), as well as the political corruption underlying all of it. Private debt was exploding throughout. The public debt increase of the 2000s, though it didn’t help the problem, was at best an indirect contributor to it. But Obama doesn’t say that. Instead, he lauds Clinton’s administration for its policies.
[ ... ]
Deficit hysteria is meant to hide what really happened, a private unregulated credit machine that loaded Americans with debt they couldn’t pay back. It’s telling sign that this is how Obama framed his opposition to Romney’s tax cuts. In Obama’s telling, it’s austerity, or crisis. The historical irony is that Greece is falling apart because austerity. For what it’s worth.
The Obama campaign does not want to talk about what they want to do to Social Security.
Social Security: If not now, then when do we talk about it?
The remark in question came during last week's debate about fiscal issues on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." In an otherwise forgettable conversation, things became newsworthy when the conversation turned to Obama's position on Social Security reforms. At that point, the president's consigliere, David Axelrod, responded not with a clear position, but instead by trying to halt the conversation.
"I'll tell you what, when you get elected to the United States Senate and sit at that table, we'll have that discussion," he told the panel.
When pressed, Axelrod insisted that the election season meant no debate should proceed. "This is not the time, he said. "We're not going to have that discussion right now."
They want to talk about what Romney would do to Social Security, but not so much about what they would do.
Obama Campaign “Clarifies” Approach on Social Security
At the Truth Team page, you see Obama’s principles on Social Security reform laid out. And it matches what Obama has been saying on this matter for a while, full of vague statements and undefined concepts
[ ... ]
There’s no definitive rejection of raising the retirement age, for example. He doesn’t dismiss progressive price indexing out of hand. There’s no description of changing the cost of living adjustment calculation by moving to chained CPI, which is a net benefit cut. You just have an offhand reference to a column criticizing Romney’s Social Security approach, written by two guys whose plan for Social Security includes straight benefit reductions and an increase in the payroll tax rate without changing the payroll tax cap.
I think this “clarification” creates more questions than resolutions.
Predicting the future through online data mining
Recorded Future predicts when and where a demonstration will occur after mining from the web all the related activities.
This existential dilemma does not arise from the fact that it’s finally possible to organise all the things the web already knows about the future, which could certainly become useful to prevent diseases or famine, but rather that a private company now means to know everything, that is, all human projects.
We have entered an age where only those framed within the approved interests of Recorded Future clients will be able to live freely, that is, without being predicted. But how free is an existence that is completely revealed to the modern "lack of emergencies"?
As Heidegger explained, emergencies do not arise when something doesn't function correctly, but rather when "everything functions … and propels everything more and more toward further functioning". It's within this logic that as soon as something critical to the interests of those who can afford it fails to function, Recorded Future will alert its customers, who will then take the appropriate measures to conserve the previous condition.
In sum, Heidegger's concerns over a world lacking "emergencies" more than 50 years ago was meant to point out how technologies such as that employed by Recorded Future (and similar companies) aim to avoid the future, that is, to change the world.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Obama Campaign “Clarifies” Approach on Social Security
Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise
Critical thinking, to a large extent, has been banned or abandoned in the progressive blogosphere.
Our new site is a place where independent views and critical thought flourish.
"Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
~ John F. Kennedy
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