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You and Me
You and me
We’ve got all the time
In the world
‘Cause life is long
It goes on and on. © 2013
So much corruption and hypocrisy in America today
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“Recorded on my iPhone on 4/6/13 at 7:19 PM CDT CORRECTION: origins of oil was from rupture in in northwoods community spilling into storm drain. After that d…”
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Learn about Exxon Mobil Corporation, an industry leader in energy, and the parent of Esso, Mobil, and ExxonMobil companies around the world.” -
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2012/fortune/1205/gallery.500-most-profitable.fortune/index.html
money.cnn.com
From oil to iPads, here are the 20 companies that pulled in the most massive sums.”______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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This is so wrong…”The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project was started in 1997 by Grover G. Norquist….Our goal is to eventually see a statue, park, or road named after Reagan in all 3,140 counties in the United States.”http://www.ronaldreaganlegacyproject.org/about
www.ronaldreaganlegacyproject.org
The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is committed to preserving the legacy of one of America’s greatest presidents throughout the nation and abroad.” -
https://fandecande.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/fah-q-grover-norquist/
fandecande.wordpress.com
FAH-Q = For All to Hear & Question. ; ) ___________________________________________________________________________________________ PROBLEM: The greedy, self-serving Superwealthy and their enab… -
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162206/grover-norquists-culture-corruption
After his central role in the Jack Abramoff scandal, why does Grover Norquist have any credibility left?” -
“We are not auditioning for fearless leader,” Grover Norquist told conservatives at the CPAC convention in February. “We don’t need a president to tell us in…______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Exxon wins safety award as Mayflower sees no end to spill cleanup (VIDEO) — RT USArt.comAs responders continue clearing tens of thousands of gallons of oil from a small Arkansas town after an Exxon pipeline burst, delivering a severe blow to the local ecosystem, a major NGO has named the oil giant the winner of a national safety award.”-
EXCERPT: “In preliminary other findings released in the weeks following the fire, the Chemical Safety Board has faulted Chevron’s failure to replace a heavily corroded pipe on the 245,000 barrel-per-day crude distillation unit that ruptured setting off the fire, which caused only minor injuries at the second-largest refinery in California.
The board has also criticized the refinery for failing to shut the unit down when it sent firefighters on August 6 to try and find the leak.
California’s worker safety regulator the California Occupational Safety & Health Division (Cal/OSHA) fined Chevron $963,000 on January 30 for 25 violations of worker safety regulations.”http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/04/05/us/05reuters-refinery-fire-chevron-richmond.html?hp&gwh=7669496AF28CDA75228882EAC67B1338The federal agency investigating the fire that broke out in August at Chevron Corp’s oil refinery in Richmond, California, faulted the state’s regulatory system for not being proactive enough in preventing accidents.” -
“According to the indictments, one Republican official from Queens frisked a briber, who was actually an undercover F.B.I. agent, to make sure he wasn’t wearing a wire. Then failed to find the wire. Then took the bribe while being recorded. This all happened at a super-secret meeting at Sparks, the steakhouse where John Gotti had Paul Castellano rubbed out. I believe there should be an unwritten rule in criminal conspiracy that you do not schedule your big payoff at the most famous gangland murder site in Manhattan.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/opinion/collins-a-new-era-in-political-corruption.html?hp&_r=0
New York’s recent corruption scandals shatter our confidence that taking money was theone thing politicians know how to do well.” -
“Unemployment, not excessive money printing, is what ails us now — and policy should bedoing more, not less.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/opinion/Krugman-The-Urge-To-Purge.html?hp
The push to see depression as a necessary and somehow desirable punishment for past sinsis as strong as ever.” -
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/choice-of-mary-jo-white-to-head-sec-puts-fox-in-charge-of-hen-house-20130125
Former U.S. Attorney was involved in one of the SEC’s most notorious scandals” -
https://fandecande.wordpress.com/2013/04/05/open-letter-to-president-obama-9/
fandecande.wordpress.com
Social Security, don’t touch it. Mr. President, I’ve gone to bat for you over and over again.I volunteered for you in 2008 and in 2012. I stand up for you in conversation and defend you on-line. B… -
“The Big Lie”…EXCERPT from End This Depression Now! by Paul Krugman, pages 64-66;W.W. Norton & Company 2012:
“The Big Lie
‘I hear your complaints. Some of them are totally unfounded. It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that.
But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.’
–Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, on the Occupy Wall Street protests
The story I have just told about complacency and deregulation is, in fact, what happened in the run-up to the crisis. But you may have heard a different story—the one told by Michael Bloomberg in the quotation above. According to this story, debt growth was caused by liberal do-gooders and government agencies, which forced banks to lend to minority homebuyers and subsidized dubious mortgages. This alternative story, which says that it’s all the government’s fault, is dogma on the right. From the point of view of most, indeed virtually all, Republicans, it’s an unquestioned truth.
It isn’t true, of course. The fund manager and blogger Barry Ritholtz, who isn’t especially political but has a keen eye for flimflam, calls it the Big Lie of the financial crisis.
How do we know that the Big Lie is, in fact, not true? There are two main kinds of evidence.
First, any explanation that blames the U.S. Congress, with its supposed desire to see low-income families own homes, for the explosion of credit must confront the awkward fact that the credit boom and the housing bubble were very widespread, including many markets and assets that had nothing to do with low-income borrowers. There were housing bubbles and credit booms in Europe; there was a price surge, followed by defaults and losses after the bubble popped, in commercial real estate; within the United States, the biggest booms and busts weren’t in inner-city areas but rather in suburbs and exurbs.
Second, the great bulk of risky lending was undertaken by private lenders—and loosely regulated private lenders, at that. In particular, subprime loans—mortgage loans to borrowers who didn’t qualify according to normal prudential standards—were overwhelmingly made by private firms that were neither covered by the Community Reinvestment Act, which was supposed to encourage loans to members of minority groups, nor supervised by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored agencies charged with encouraging home lending. In fact, during most of the housing bubble Fannie and Freddie were rapidly losing market share, because private lenders would take on borrowers the government-sponsored agencies wouldn’t. Freddie Mac did start buying subprime mortgages from loan originators late in the game, but it was clearly a follower, not a leader.
In an attempt to refute this latter point, analysts at right-wing think tanks—notably Edward Pinto at the American Enterprise Institute—have produced data showing Fannie and Freddie underwriting a lot of ‘subprime and other high risk’ mortgages, lumping loans to borrowers without stellar credit scores in with loans to borrowers who failed strict lending criteria in other ways. This leads readers who don’t know better to think that Fannie and Freddie were actually deeply involved in promoting subprime lending. But they weren’t, and the ‘other high risk’ stuff turns out, on examination, to have been not especially high-risk, with default rates far below those on subprime loans.
I could go on, but you get the point. The attempt to blame government for the financial crisis falls apart in the face of even a cursory look at the facts, and the attempts to get around those facts smack of deliberate deception. This raises a question: why do conservatives want so badly to believe, and to get other people to believe, that the government did it?
The immediate answer is obvious: to believe anything else would be to admit that your political movement has been on the wrong track for decades. Modern conservatism is dedicated to the proposition that unfettered markets and the unrestricted pursuit of profit and personal gain are the keys to prosperity—and that the much-expanded role of government that emerged from the Great Depression did nothing but harm. Yet what we actually see is a story in which conservatives gained power, set about dismantling many of those Depression-era protections—and the economy plunged into a second depression, not as bad as the first, but bad enough. Conservatives badly need to explain this awkward history away, to tell a story that makes government, not lack of government, the villain.
But this in a way only pushes the question back a step. How did conservative ideology, the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, come to have such a firm grip on our political discourse? That’s a slightly harder question to answer than you might think.”
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* I highly recommend the book by Paul Krugman, “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.”
picture source: http://www.amazon.com/End-This-Depression-Paul-Krugman/dp/0393088774
A call-to-arms from Nobel Prize–winning economist and best-selling author Paul Krugman.The Great Recession is more than four years old—and counting. Yet, as Paul Krugman pointsout in this powerful volley, “Nations rich in resources, talent, and knowledge—all theingredients …” -
“Republicans will lie, cheat and steal…EXCERPT: “As I reported a couple of weeks ago, a recent Senate bill came with a nice bonus for the genetically modified seed industry: a rider, wholly unrelated to the underlying bill, that compels the USDA to ig…”
The notoriously agribiz-friendly senator freely admits that he crafted the recent GMO rider—and that Monsanto helped.” -
http://www.tribecafilm.com/filmguide/513a8415c07f5d47130004d0-gasland-part-ii
Two years ago, Josh Fox introduced us to hydraulic fracturing with his Oscar®-nominated exposé Gasland. Now this once-touted energy source has become a widely discussed, contentious topic. In his follow-up, Fox reveals the extreme circumstances facing those affected by fracking, from earthquakes to…” -
* Legacy of failure manifests as a library and museum on May 1, 2013.http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/01/16/george-w-bush-presidential-library-opening/1839687/
The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas is set to open its doors to the public on May 1.” -
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/obama-im-no-cheney-on-drones-88853.html
President Barack Obama’s defense to Democratic senators complaining about how little hisadministration has told Congress about the legal justifications for his drone policy: Dick Cheneywas worse. That’s part of what two senators in the room recounted of Obama’s response when,nea…”________________________________________________________________________________________For lagniappe…“History Licking Its Chops To Judge George W. Bush
‘Let Me At That Fucker,’ Says Branch Of Knowledge”http://www.theonion.com/articles/history-licking-its-chops-to-judge-george-w-bush,31921/
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To all the idiots out there
What do you mean public employees shouldn’t get a pension? That’s part of the incentive that attracts teachers and police officers to those jobs. You understand that they don’t get Social Security; they get a pension instead, right?
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Read more…
EXCERPT: “A retired teacher entitled to $400 a month through a civil service pension and a $300-a-month spousal benefit would have received the total amount before the government pension offset was put in place. Under the offset, however, the teacher’s spousal benefit is reduced by two-thirds of his or her pension check (about $267). So the teacher would receive $33 from Social Security. If two-thirds of the pension exceeded $300, the teacher receives nothing. The survivor benefit is subject to the same two-thirds rule.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/02/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20101102
EXCERPT: “But her career in public service is going to cost her a chunk of the Social Security she already earned, as well as a portion, and possibly all, of the spousal retirement benefit she would otherwise be due through her husband.”
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Ripoff-Social-Security-and-California-Teachers.html
EXCERPT: “Over a million public employees in California who qualify for Social Security –directly or indirectly through their spouses – won’t get the benefits when they retire. They include firefighters, police officers and schoolteachers. Years ago, Congress voted to keep pensioners from double dipping. But the decision wound up penalizing civil servants across the country.”
For perspective: Hank Paulson’s Bush-led-government-aided thievery of $200 million…
EXCERPT: “Another culprit was Goldman Sachs, which also had the good fortune, around then, to see its CEO, a bald-headed Frankensteinian goon named Hank Paulson (who received an estimated $200 million tax deferral by joining the government), ascend to Treasury secretary.”
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Open Letter to President Obama
Social Security, don’t touch it.
Mr. President,
I’ve gone to bat for you over and over again. I volunteered for you in 2008 and in 2012. I stand up for you in conversation and defend you on-line. But if you make any cuts to Social Security, that’s a deal-breaker.
We voted for you to stick up for us, not take advantage of us. Don’t give in to Republicans. Stand up to them.
No cuts to Social Security. Instead, lift the $100k salary cap on contributions to Social Security, so that millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share into the system that everybody uses.
And no means-testing either.
Transcription of Paul Krugman on CNBC’s Squawk Box, July 11, 2012
Paul Krugman: “That’s actually, that’s not actually right, by the way. It’s certainly not true. What matters is life expectancy at age 65, and that is higher for more affluent people. But think about how many billionaires are there? The amount of money you can save by means-testing Medicare turns out to be trivial. And, by the way, if you do means-test it, what you have done is increased marginal tax rates because you’ve said if you make more money then you will lose your Medicare benefit. That’s actually reducing incentives.”
Sincerely, your fellow American,
Justin Bass
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Read more:
EXCERPT:
“President Obama next week will take the political risk of formally proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare in his annual budget in an effort to demonstrate his willingness to compromise with Republicans and revive prospects for a long-term deficit-reduction deal, administration officials say.”
EXCERPT:
“The same C.B.O. document presents a series of alternative ways to achieve such a goal, including the elimination of the current $113,700 cap on income subject to the Social Security payroll tax. If the cap or ceiling were lifted, the amount of money raised would be 0.6 percent of G.D.P., the exact amount of income needed to get Social Security out of the red — a striking coincidence.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/14/opinion/la-oe-sanders-social-20110214
EXCERPT:
“Further, despite the manufactured hysteria about a crisis, Social Security has not contributed one penny to the very serious deficit situation the United States faces. Social Security is fully funded by the payroll tax that workers and their employers pay; it’s not paid for by the Treasury. Our deficit has been, in recent years, largely caused by the cost of two wars, tax breaks for the rich, a Medicare prescription drug program written by the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and the Wall Street bailout — not Social Security.”
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EXCERPT:
“In particular, 84 percent said that they oppose reducing Social Security benefits as a means of reducing the federal budget deficit. The same percentage of older voters said that the future of the retirement security program should be considered separately, and as the graph below shows, political affiliation made barely any difference.”
picture source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Barack_Obama.jpg
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fandecande 