Fact-esque

Randian Libertardianism and Traffic Lights

Since none of us get anywhere these days espousing intelligent, workable, rational solutions to our deadly problems, and seeing as how the Randian views of the batshit crazy Right (BCR) are so much easier to pursue what with their not having to provide any sort of proof that any solution they propose has any connection whatever with what any one of us not born with a silver spoon thrust through their cerebral cortex would consider reality, not to mention that their simplistic and/or fantasy solutions are far more welcome in the Halls of Power than our own practicable and successful but unfriendly-to-the-rich ones because we would require them to cease stealing everything they can get their grubby, grasping little hands on and put some sort of limits on their greed, I figure if you can't beat em join em.

Now, given that the Corporate Right has seized on the Randian "idea" that govt has no right to tell anybody what to do as a way of justifying their claim that it doesn't have the right to tell corporations they can't kill us no matter how profitable it is, I've been looking for an issue of unwarranted govt intervention in our freedoms which the BCR has overlooked, and I think I've found one.

Traffic lights.

Liberal Ideas Aren't "Fringe"

In 1964, Lyndon Baines Johnson, not the most liberal of liberal FDR Dems, fought the right-wing poor-bashers by saying stuff like this in speeches all over the country (this excerpt comes from a speech he made in North Carolina on May 7):

Right here in North Carolina, the State where I stand, poverty has left its mark. Some people say that if these Americans are poor, it is their own fault. I have even heard others say that God ordains poverty for the poor. Well, I don't believe them, and I don't believe God believes them either.

Just a small comment: I know God doesn't believe that nonsense and I doubt that anyone beyond the 19% of the braindead population that follows the likes of Ron Paul and Glenn Beck believes it, either. So it isn't, like, "fringe" thinking. It's, like, "mainstream" thinking. So what we need, clearly, is a political party that won't run from reality like it was a bad smell. Ideas?

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It's Illegal to Be Homeless Near DisneyWorld

Just about a year ago, a Deutchebank analyst figured out that by the end of this summer, more than half the mortgages in the country would be underwater. That process has begun. In May the mortgage delinquency rate - which the Masters of the Universe and their media puppets insisted would decline - rose almost 10%. (Via Avedon)

Talx: Making Sure Laid Off Workers Don't Collect Unemployment

Wall Street loves it when a company lays off workers. To them, it doesn't mean the company is in financial trouble, it means the company obviously hired more people than it needed and is clearing out the "deadwood". They call it getting "lean and mean" and they reward companies who do it by paying more for that company's stock, which makes the executives and investors richer.

Layoffs would make execs and invests even richer than they do now if there was just some way to avoid paying those pesky unemployment insurance fees. If those damn lazy bastards they just got rid of couldn't sit around on their fat asses enjoying the easy life on the company's dime, then the company could put that money where it naturally belongs - in the pockets of its execs and invests, not paying the rents for the trashy little apartments all those bums live in. But it's such a time-consuming business, stealing thousands of penny-ante unemployment claims, that it's almost not worth the effort.

Enter Talx (pronounced "talks"), a company that promises that for a very reasonable price they'll fight all those unemployment claims and save you $$millions$$. And they do. (Via Jim Hightower)

Food Stamps prime the Economic Pump

Globalization moved tens of millions of good jobs overseas to low-wage, low-tax countries; the banksters' refusal to loosen credit except for scams and rip-offs from which they would benefit has prevented legitimate businesses from borrowing money to grow on, thus adding jobs to a sputtering economy that desperately needs them, even though we provided the bankers with a financial "stimulus" to do just that; and the Bushies (with Bill Clinton's help) virtually destroyed all the elements of the safety net, calling it "welfare reform".

Given all that, it is more than a little ironic that local govts are now urging people to sign up for food stamps as a way of pumping up the local economy.

The Obama Disconnect: Hunger v Wall Street

Poppy Bush lost his bid for re-election in '92 largely because he was perceived to be too distant and disconnected from the suffering on Main Street that was the inevitable result of Reagan's pro-banker, pro-corporate, pro-Wall Street economic poolicies. Clinton won by concentrating on populist economic reform rhetoric and the whole campaign was directed by 4 famous words of James Carville's: "It's the economy, stupid." That strategy worked largely because Poppy looked disengaged and isolated from normal life. After all, he had to have barcode scanners explained to him.

Poppy was in fact disengaged and looked it. Obama is neither. He looks engaged, desperately so, and has begun to talk populist in an effort to connect to the perceived anger and disappointment of the vanishing middle class, and has even made at least one move toward changing the direction of his totally pro-bankster policies.

The Success of the RWNM Is the Country's Ruin

Bob Herbert's column (which really ought to be called "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness" since that's what he always seems to be doing) wants to remind us that it isn't the rich or even the middle class that got hurt the worst by the banksters' shameless manipulation of the economy, a fact, he notes, that we have steadfastly refused to acknowledge.

Honest Numbers At Last: 16% of Americans in Poverty, 17% Unemployed

After nearly a decade of the Bush Admin playing with statistics to ensure no one would know how bad it was, I give full credit to Obama for allowing his National Academy of Sciences to correct their poverty formula (or at least begin correcting it) so it reflects the real world instead of deliberately violating it.

Having said that, I then have to add that the price for the Bush Economy is turning out to be a lot higher than anyone but pessimists like me thought it was. That's the reason Bush hid it in the first place.

Entities Not Too Big to Fail...Wait...The FDIC?!

I started out this afternoon by running into tech ticker's Top Ten List of BIG Companies Facing Bankruptcy, which included a few surprises, like Hertz, Goodyear tire, and - oops! - CBS. O yes.

7. CBS

Weak advertising and falling license fees have sent CBS's earnings off a cliff in 2009.

If they remain depressed for too long, the company could have trouble refinancing $3.2 billion of debt coming due over the next five years.

It will really come down to whether or not CBS’s earnings collapse is merely cyclical, or the result of structural trend whereby traditional TV is dying.

I wouldn't worry too much. $3.2BIL is just about what the CIS franchise alone will make over the next five years. Still, the thought that traditional tv might be dead is delicious even if it is 50 years too late.

Too Late, Joe: Where Was Your Empathy When We Needed It?

When Bill Clinton set about on his "Third Way" oddyssey, one of his first priorities was to "end welfare as we know it". And he succeeded since he was essentially giving the anti-poor Pubs what they'd wanted since LBJ started his War on Poverty. Many of us warned over and over that there was going to be a price to pay. Barbara Ehrenreich in today's NYT shows us what it is and it ain't pretty. But you knew that already.