Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Romney’s foreign faux pas suggest a lack of presidential timber.


By Marc Jampole

Of the four highly reported mistakes that Romney made on his foreign trip, two seem to have been calculated in advance, one rightly and one wrongly.

When I say calculated rightly, I don’t mean that Romney said the right thing, but that it worked to attract or solidify votes.  Romney’s comments about the superiority of Israeli culture leading to its higher standard of living were incorrect and odious in light of the restrictions under which Palestinians have lived in the occupied territories.

But Romney’s subtly racist remark plays into a myth of Jewish voters and another myth of many voters of all persuasions (except Islam). Jews are taught from a young age that they are the chosen people, chosen to be, as Isaiah put it, a “light unto the nations.” Romney’s talk about cultural superiority is something that Jews everywhere will take for granted. The superior culture remark also reflected the views of many Americans, expressed vehemently by Samuel Huntington, that we are in a cultural war with Islam and that our western (Christian) civilization is superior, as demonstrated by our standard of living.  Again, I reject this thinking, but at the same time I understand that a large number of my fellow citizens share these wrong-headed notions and Romney has made himself a more attractive candidate to them.

On the other hand, Romney’s distancing from his wife’s Olympic sport had the opposite effect than intended. Romney wanted to rid himself of his image as a patrician of wealth who can’t relate to the average Joe-and-Jane. Instead, he portrayed himself as an insensitive husband, the type that won’t take his wife to a “chick flick” for her birthday or go to the garden show displaying her orchids.  Instead of portraying the image of a warm and loving husband, he ended up looking like a complete dolt to both men and women.

That leaves us with the two foreign faux pas that I believe Romney did not say on purpose; of course we’ll never know for sure: His whining concerns about security and his revelation that he had been to a secret meeting. Both of these mistakes show a certain lack of what used to be called “presidential timber.” Have you ever noticed that ex-presidents mostly say good things about the current office-holder or they keep their mouths shut?  Romney is the former leader of the Olympics and while there is no written law, most ex-leaders will support the current regime, unless a complete disaster occurs, which clearly has not happened in the very well-run London games. When caught in what I think was an unguarded moment, Romney chose to be competitive, not presidential. It’s something that none of our recent presidents would have done.

Not knowing or forgetting that he had attended a secret meeting reveals a lack of knowledge in the customs of the host. It was a mistake in etiquette, and again, presidents of companies, charities, business associations and countries don’t tend to make those kinds of mistakes.  Presidents know the custom in advance or they tend to understand what it is from the subtle cues of others.

Romney has frequently shown himself to be out of touch with the American public, and those who have commented always link this inability of Romney to connect with his life of luxurious wealth. But complaining about a non-existent security problem of your former enterprise and not following the proper etiquette of your hosts (which others through the years have managed to figure out) have nothing to do with being wealthy. Presidents and other leaders tend to have more money than anyone else, and so any behavior that we classify as “presidential” has qualities of wealth attached to it. Being presidential is a kind of grace that makes everyone feel at ease and important.  From Reagan through Obama, all of our recently elected presidents have had it, and curiously, none of the candidates they defeated had it, except for Al Gore who actually won the popular vote.  

We like our leaders to look and act like leaders. Romney may look presidential, but he is having extreme difficulty playing the part.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Hacker wants to cripple students by denying them basic tools of a complex society


By Marc Jampole

That Andrew Hacker would advocate ending the requirement to study algebra to get a four-year college degree is mildly surprising. There has been no hint of such anti-intellectualism in his many fine essays on demographics, race and the education system in the New York Review of Books and elsewhere throughout the years.  On the other hand, he has not been afraid to express a controversial opinion, usually backed by a slew of empirical evidence.

That he would use cheap and transparent propaganda tricks to advocate anything, let alone the deep-sixing of algebra, as he does in his article in last Sunday’s New York Times opinion section, is both shameful and disappointing. The article makes a shambles out of truth by defining algebra by its hardest and most advanced features.

Hacker sprinkles his article with examples of “algebra” as proof that it’s just too hard for most kids:

·         (x² + y²)² = (x² - y²)² + (2xy)²
·         Vectorial angles and discontinuous functions
·         Quadratic equations
·         Fermat’s dilemma (I think he means Fermat’s Last Theorem)

Hacker is right to say that no one except engineers, scientists and the occasional financial analyst will need to know any of his examples, which are all very hard. But correct me if I’m wrong, these are all subjects for the second year of algebra (I think the first year includes some simple quadratics).

But let’s take a look at what else Hacker wants to keep children from learning (except the lucky few who will get technical degrees):

·         X + 5 = 10
·         2X – 3 = 5
·         .08x = 80
·         a/b = c/d, so ad = bc


That’s all math from the first year of algebra and all necessary for most people in our technology-oriented society.
 
The uses for my first three examples come every time we buy anything, be it in a supermarket, department store, laundromat or stadium. These basics of algebra allow us to figure our taxes and balance our checkbook.
 
The last example is particularly noteworthy, because since I began working at my first job running a closed circuit television studio for a subsidiary of the old Ma Bell in Seattle and writing/directing such classics as “Safe Pole Climbing,” not a week has gone by when I have not needed this basic equation.

Here is a classic example: I am billing an employee’s time at $65 an hour and paying her a total compensation of $38,000, meaning I break even once she has billed 11 hours to clients every week. To what level do I have to raise her rate to get the same break-even point if I increase her total compensation to $45,000?  In the basic equation a/b = c/d, so ad = bc: a is what she makes, b is her hourly billing rate and c is her new compensation.

Let’s plug it in:

$38,000 times d = $65 times $45,000
 
And now solve, using the simplest of algebra that is taught about a third of the way through the first year (and a calculator for the arithmetic!):

38,000d = 2,925,000
d = $76.97, which I would round up to $77/hour or down to $75/hour.

In one form or another, week after week for decades I have faced a problem that this equation helped me to solve—as a university instructor of foreign languages, as a television news writer and reporter, as a would-be Hollywood screenwriter, as a marketing manager, as a public relations executive.

Hacker draws a picture of algebra that has nothing to do with the real-world needs of people.

I won’t dwell on the fact that learning mathematics is good for young brains because it entails developing a new way of thinking—similar to studying Chinese or Spanish—since Hacker freely admits it himself and proposed an algebra-free math curriculum for the liberal arts type that focuses on finding the mathematical beauty in the visual arts, music and poetry.

I don’t think it’s unfair to ask college or even high school students to pass a first-year algebra class. The key word is “pass.” Getting a C because the last few weeks got a little rough is no shame. It just means that someone shouldn’t consider going into any science or technology career, as the kids best suited to those careers whiz through algebra, trigonometry, calculus and beyond. And it probably also means that you’ll have a deficit in one area when competing against those who excel in higher math courses in liberal arts fields such as writing, law, business administration, sales, human resources and even the visual and performing arts. For example, my understanding of physics, which hinges on an understanding of the rudiments of calculus—has helped me win the advertising and public relations work of many technology companies.

There are plenty of fields that don’t require that someone got through trigonometry, and many of them pay very well.

But the world has become too complicated for anyone who can’t figure out that two cans of beans that are $5.00 each cost $10.00 total. That’s 2X = ?, if X is $5. And that, Mr. Hacker, is algebra.

Let’s close with a  slight subject change: Unfortunately, many non-college jobs pay very little money and much less than what they used to pay, which is why contemporary parents are in a panic to get their kids into the colleges associated with success in the high-paying fields. These parents would be better off campaigning for a higher minimum wage, laws that help unions organize and other laws that raise salaries so that one can attain and maintain a middle class lifestyle whether one is a Harvard-educated lawyer or a community college trained security guard.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXVII

In the 27th installment in a weekly series, Steve Benen at Rachel Maddow's Blog notes 72 lies told in the past week by the Republican presumptive nominee.

"What's especially striking, in addition to the volume and frequency of the falsehoods, is how often the dishonesty is obvious, Benen wrote. "Jonathan Bernstein has labeled this 'lazy mendacity' -- untruths based on 'the indifference to any fact-checking,' and 'the insistence on continuing to use a lie long after it's been definitively debunked.'"

Selections from the August 15, 2012 issue


















Friday, July 27, 2012

Portable Internet Player Offers Progressive Lifeline


By Jim Cullen

For those of us who have resisted the siren call of smartphones — and we are still in the majority, although the gap is closing — there is a workaround that can give us much of the convenience of remote Internet access without paying hundreds of dollars more to cell phone providers.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project in February found that 46% of Americans say they have smartphones, while 41% of Americans get by with regular cell phones and 12% have no cell phone at all. Smartphone adoption rates of 60% or more were reported among college graduates, 18-35-year-olds and those with an annual household income of $75,000 or more. Among seniors, just 13% of those ages 65 and older have smartphones. But 53% of seniors (and 78% of American adults) use the Internet.

If you don’t have a smartphone, portable Internet access can be particularly useful if you live in the 90% of the country where conservative radio executives deny us access to over-the-air progressive talk radio. A portable media player such as the iPod Touch, which costs $199 to $399, depending on the “flash memory,” is a little thinner than an iPhone but has most of the same functions when you are in a “wi-fi” area, and you don’t have to pay the extra $100 monthly cost of remote Internet access.

(Similar portable media units that use the rival Android operating system include Samsung’s Galaxy players 4 and 5, which cost $229 and $269, and Sony Walkman Z, at $249.)

I got the iPod Touch (or iTouch) two years ago, partly because I needed to understand how these portable devices worked so that we might figure out how to incorporate The Progressive Populist into them. We still haven’t figured that out, but I found the iTouch was useful as a substitute for a smartphone.

If you’re looking for tablets that have the same functions as the iTouch but with a larger screen, which is especially useful when reading books and long texts, browsing the Web or watching videos, consider the iPad ($399 and up) and its less-robust Android rivals, the Kindle Fire ($199) and Google’s Nexus 7 ($249). But if you want something you can put in your pocket or purse, an iPod Touch, for my money, is the best choice.

The iPod started out as a device for storing music, and it’s still useful as a repository for your digitized album collection, but the iTouch debuted in 2007 as the iPhone’s poor cousin, though its features have been upgraded until it has most of the functions of an iPhone except the cell phone.

Since October 2011, when iPhone Operating System 5 was released with the fourth generation iTouch, you no longer need a computer to activate the iTouch, although you need to be in the vicinity of a wi-fi signal to get Internet access and obtain third-party applications (apps) from the App Store through iTunes. And it’s useful to have access to a computer that you can use as a base for your iTouch.

The iTouch comes with about 20 apps pre-installed, including email, calculator, calendar, camera, clock, contacts, FaceTime video telephone software, iBooks, iTunes, maps, music, notes, newsstand, photos, Youtube, stocks, weather, voice memos, videos and the Safari web browser.

The only apps for which I have paid money are TuneIn Radio (99¢), which allows you to record online broadcasts if you have a wi-fi signal, and RSSRadio Premium ($1.99), which allows you to download podcasts when you have wi-fi access and play offline. Among the podcasts I download are the Stephanie Miller Show (which is telecast as Talking Liberally on Current TV — if you can find Current TV on your cable); Sam Seder’s Majority Report; the Ed Schultz radio show; and Best of the Left, a compilation of progressive radio offerings. I also record Thom Hartmann’s radio show, among assorted online broadcasts on TuneIn Radio.

Other podcasts that are available include many NPR and Pacifica shows, Counterspin, Democracy Now!; Mike Malloy; Randi Rhodes, Ring of Fire with Mike Papantonio and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., WTF with Marc Maron; and many foreign radio shows. An iTouch can be a lifeline for progressives who are stuck in a small town or even a good-sized city, such as Austin, where talk radio is dominated by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the local right wingers.

Among my most-used apps that I can use offline — that is, when I am away from home and don’t have a wi-fi signal — are the Calculator, Calendar, Contacts, Clock, Dictionary, Music, Photos. If I have downloaded the current edition of the New York Times and The Nation, I can browse them offline.

Useful apps at home (where I have a broadband wi-fi signal) include the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com), so I no longer need to bug my wife about who that character actor is on TV, and where else I have seen that actor, and the Safari web browser. Also handy are Facebook, Twitter, Weather and various news and sports apps.

Useful apps on the road, which you can check at wi-fi places, include Maps, which in addition to telling directions will tell whether highways are congested or closed, GasBuddy, to check gas prices down the road, the Weather Channel, which is particularly useful when traveling to or from Iowa in February. And podcasts and audible books that you can download to the iTouch are a pleasant diversion when you’re driving long distances in areas where the radio choices are evangelists, right-wing talkers or bad country music.

Places that offer free wi-fi include most Arbys restaurants, Barnes & Nobles bookstores, IHOPs, McDonalds, Starbucks and other coffee shops and most public libraries and many roadside rest stops support public wi-fi.


Comment on your favorite podcasts, apps and players. In case you wonder, we didn’t seek or get any consideration from Apple for this article.


From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2012

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Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Consistent NCAA & Penn State decisions show that it’s always about the bucks

By Marc Jampole

The public argument over whether the NCAA was too harsh, too lenient or just right in punishing Penn State has replaced the argument over whether Penn State should have taken down or left up the statue of Joe Paterno.

What I find so remarkable in the unfolding of the Penn State sex abuse cover-up is the consistency in the decisions reached by both the NCAA and Penn State. They both held one value above all others.

If OpEdge was a TV or radio show, this moment is when we would hear a hard rock base line followed by a slightly spacey sounding male voice yelping a single word, ”Money!.....”

That the NCAA’s decision is all about the Benjamins, Grants, Jacksons, Lincolns and McKinleys is fairly obvious.

The NCAA’s actions constituted a stiff fine, but does not prevent Penn State from doing business in the future, as ending the football program would have. Cleaning out some 13 years of Paterno victories cost no one anything—except the pill of bitter pride for the players and coaches. Thanks to the good fortune of dying quickly and unexpectedly, Joe Paterno never suffered the torments of seeing 13 years of victories and the NCAA record snatched from him because of his own hubris.

The $60 million and loss of bowls and scholarships hampers Penn State, but a “death penalty” would have put thousands of people in Happy Valley out of work and led to a major depression in an area in which college sports, and particular football, is a major industry.

The Penn State decision was also about money. After the revelations that Joe Paterno knew that Sandusky was raping boys on campus and engaged in a cover-up of those horrifying facts, how could the statue of the former saint remain standing?

But why keep the name on the library? It’s simple: Joe Paterno raised the funds that built it, contributing several millions of his own to the project. When people give that kind of money to any charitable or educational institution, there is always a contract. I’m guessing that somewhere there’s a contract in which the name of the library is bestowed upon Paterno.  And if there’s no contract, there’s a letter of understanding, or public minutes, a mission statement or something in writing.

Where there’s something in writing, lawyers lurk, and we know what that would mean in the case of the Paterno Library: a long and very ugly law suit in which the public would learn once again of the special circumstances that might give PSU the right to change the name of the building.

In short, the statue is an amusement, but a library is real money.  Once a statue is gone, it’s easy to forget it was ever there. But you can’t tear down a library.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Those who dream of cowboy justice wake up to the reality of mass murder at the movies.


By Marc Jampole

Facing the facts on guns in American society completely demoralizes me, and no more so than when I have to view those facts through the prism of yet another mass murder committed by someone who legally purchased his weapons and ammunition.

Perhaps most depressing is the nature of the political discussion. The debate should center on the formulation of a mix of new gun control laws and regulations that could screen a nut like James Holmes, who killed 12 and injured nearly 60 during a midnight showing of a new Batman movie in an Aurora, Colorado theatre.

But the discussion in the news media is not about fixing the problem, but about the extreme unlikelihood that we will even consider stronger gun control laws.  At the root of every article about the inability of our political system to consider tighter gun control is the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the billions of dollars it has spent over the years to buy politicians and spew pro-gun propaganda to the public.

The NRA has achieved its goals. Compared to 20 years ago, more Americans currently support loosening our already sieve-like gun control laws. One of the weapons Holmes used was an assault rifle, which is essentially a light machine gun. The assault rifle is a weapon neither of the hunt nor of sport shooting, and yet a majority of Americans now support their legal sale. 

As with global warming, healthcare reform and tax policies, a large portion of Americans prefer to ignore the facts of gun violence in the United States. Here are some I pulled from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence:
  • The firearm homicide rate in the U.S. is 19.5 times higher than rates in 22 other populous high-income countries combined, despite similar non-lethal crime and violence rates.
  • Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occurred in the United States.
  • An estimated 41% of gun-related homicides and 94% of gun-related suicides would not occur under the same circumstances had no guns been present.
  • A gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used in a completed or attempted suicide than to be used in a self-defense shooting; 11 times more likely to be used in a criminal assault or homicide and four times more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting death or injury than to be used in a self-defense shooting.
  • Every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens compared with more than 30,000 gun deaths.

In short, loose gun control laws in the United States sacrifice the lives of 30,000 people every year, all to shield from prosecution 200 people who killed others with guns while protecting themselves.

These facts are never part of the core discussion concerning gun violence. And yet we hear—and the news media publish—the yahoos who propose that if more people had guns, perhaps fewer people would have died in the Aurora movie theatre or other mass murders.

Let’s play out the nightmare of which these gun supporters dream.  You’re in the theatre and all of sudden the air is filled with smoke and gun shots.  So you pull out you gun and start shooting back in the direction you think it’s coming from. Someone on the other side of the theatre sees you fire your weapon and thinks you’re the shooter and starts aiming at you. Meanwhile, the hundreds of other people in the theatre now have gunfire coming at them from three, maybe even more, directions. I know that Will Smith survived the Mexican standoff at the end of Enemy of the State, but that was a movie.  Remember, all the other actors survived as well, because the bullets were fake. Not so in Aurora. More guns shooting would have lead to one thing only—more dead and more injured.

Considering that it was gun-loving Colorado, I want to thank the x number of gun owners who were packing that evening who decided not to draw their firearms.   

Gun control laws demonstrate the corruption of our current political system.  Any number of politicians would be delighted to support stronger gun laws, that is, if enough people would pony up both the small fortune they would lose from the NRA and the large fortune to match what the NRA will spend to defeat them. It’s all about money and getting elected.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Mitt's Mendacity Vol. XXVI

See the 26th installment of Mitt's Mendacity, compiled by Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog, featuring the top 26 lies told by Mitt Romney this past week. Includes links to the previous 25 weeks chronicling Mitt's Mendacity.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Travelers wants us to channel our inner dog for lower insurance rates & the pride that comes of obedience.

By Marc Jampole

To say it’s a dog’s life once described a dreary, harsh and probably impoverished condition. Nowadays we would probably use the term “dog’s life” to symbolize living in the lap(dog) of luxury. Spending on dogs and otherpets has tripled over the past 20 years. Stores for training, feeding and grooming dogs seem to be proliferating at a pandemic rate.

Dogs now serve as a major motif in television commercials for virtually every product, including beer, snack foods, automobiles and clothing. In these television spots, dogs can be symbols of family, of loyalty to the pack (if not to a spouse), of good-naturedness, of goofiness, and even of freedom. 

But it is the image of a mindlessly happy slave blindly following orders to which Travelers Insurance wants us to aspire in its new commercial for auto and other insurance. Among the traditional values associated with dogs, the Travelers ad favors blind obedience and easy trainability. 

The commercial focuses exclusively on a dog that does everything it’s supposed to do, and more. The visual narration unfolds in 9 vignettes of the same “good dog” being good.  Since it’s a commercial for auto insurance, it naturally takes place in a car-dependent suburban setting.

Here are the 9 vignettes:

1.      The dog covers a hole in which it has probably buried a bone.
2.      It pulls the sprinkler to the middle of the yard with its teeth.
3.      It wipes its front paws on a floor mat before entering the house.
4.      Its paw grabs a water bottle that its master has left on a table and places it in a trash bin.
5.      It drops a set of car keys from its teeth into the key tray by the door.
6.      It looks both ways before crossing the sidewalk, thereby avoiding a collision with a woman pushing a baby carriage.
7.      It tries to clean up spilt milk by dredging a cloth through the white puddle with its teeth.
8.      It puts its empty food bowl in the open dishwasher.
9.      It takes a bag of groceries in its teeth from the back of a mini-van and carries it inside the house.

The narration subtly twists each of these vignettes into a corresponding action that a human could, and should, take to be a better driver or get a better rate on car (and home) insurance. The phrases include, “safe driver,” “loyal driver,” “accident forgiveness,” “rewarded for good behavior,” “recognized for doing the right thing, ” “the good things you do, but maybe nobody notices,” and my favorite, “Travelers wants you to be good.”

The background music is a Speakeasy 20’s version of a song that goes “I’ve been good to you, yes I’ve been good….”

It made me want to sit up…

…and fetch a newspaper or bring a leash in my teeth to some human in hopes of getting a crunchy little ball of processed meat and meal, or perhaps a scratch behind the ear.  

No one can miss the metaphor: the dog is us, at least a better version of us which is rewarded for its goodness by lower automobile and home insurance rates.  The total identification between the dog and the ideal of human behavior plays out in the call to action: to visit to the goodbehavior.com website.

It’s one thing to say, “She has an elephant’s memory” or “He’s crazy like a fox,” but the Travelers “good dog” ad, which is part of a whole series of ads in which dogs symbolize humans, takes the analogy beyond the comparison of a single trait to an all-encompassing idealization of humans mindlessly doing the right thing.

That right thing is defined by Travelers not only as a set of driving behaviors, but a set of consumer behaviors as well: How else do we explain the presence of loyalty as one of the “good boy” behaviors proposed in the commercial, when loyalty has nothing to do with safe driving?  Product loyalty is, after all, the holy grail of marketers. A more encompassing view of what constitutes a “good boy” imbues the imagery, which resides in a world of suburban consumerism, replete with ranch-style home, gas-guzzling automobile, dish washer, plastic water bottle and other  disposable paraphernalia of suburban excess. To Travelers, to be a “good boy” requires that one not only drive safely, but to obey all the rules for good consumerism like customer loyalty and mindless acquisition . In another context, “the good dog” might morph to something savage such as the “good Nazi” or “good Soviet,” but Travelers has something a little less overtly violent in mind: just be a happy idiot.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

The Big Squeeze

Click to enlarge image / Graphic by Kevin Kreneck

Friday, July 13, 2012

Not releasing past tax returns is an enormous PR blunder by Romney campaign.

By Marc Jampole

Mitt Romney continues to refuse to release his past tax returns, while insisting that there’s “nothing hidden in them.”

It’s an untenable position, since it begs the obvious question, “If there’s nothing hidden, why not release them?” 

The answer, of course, is that the returns will likely show the enormous amount of money he makes, how he makes it and how he uses sophisticated techniques to avoid paying taxes.  We won’t see anything illegal in Romney’s returns, but we will probably see how much he still earns from Bain and be able to connect some of those earnings in certain years to layoffs of companies that Bain bought and sold. It will also probably show a number of tax avoidance techniques using loopholes in the current tax laws, such as “carried interest” and tax shelters in foreign lands. The returns will reinforce the notion that Romney is a fat-cat one-percenter who should be paying more in taxes.

The returns will be bad news for the Romney campaign, which is precisely why he should have released them already. 

Get the bad news out early and all at once. That’s one of the truisms that I have learned from 25 years of developing and implementing crisis communications plans for companies in many industries and of many sizes, including three of the largest chapter 11 bankruptcies in history.   Letting the bad news fester can only lead to three things, all bad for the company or individual:

1.      The bad news stays in front of the pubic longer.
2.      The bad news leaks out slowly, so what was just one story becomes many stories over time.
3.      When the bad news breaks, it will be bigger than it would have otherwise been, because added to the news is the fact of the cover-up.  Take, for example, Penn State’s child abuse scandal.

Once bad news is out there, the company or individual can address it, either by telling the world why it won’t happen again or by asserting its side of the story.  The second approach would be the one for Romney to take. He is already advocating the positions that enable him to make and keep so much money. The fact that he does what he says is okay shouldn’t surprise anyone. But by refusing to release the returns, the Romney campaign keeps the issue in the news and gives the Obama campaign a symbolic cudgel with which to beat Romney again and again…and again.

I can understand Romney’s reluctance to release the returns before he had sewed up the nomination, given the complicated tango he danced with the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party, AKA the Tea Party.

But if Mitt had asked me, I would have made a strong recommendation to release the returns as soon as he had a majority of convention delegates in hand. Once out, he could have responded to the criticism by saying, "There’s nothing illegal in the returns, so it’s a closed matter. Let’s move on.”

Romney would still have to defend his economic positions, he would still be a poster child for the fat cats and he would still be open to charges that his only concerns are for the wealthy and that he doesn’t care about anyone else.  But he’ll have to defend those accusations no matter what.  With the returns out, he could spend his time trying to explain to the American people why he thinks his tax policies work to the benefit of everyone (FYI, they don’t.)

By not releasing the returns, he reinforces the idea that something nefarious is going on. He turns a simple matter into a cover-up. And that’s much worse than admitting what everyone knows already: that like other wealthy people, he makes a lot of money and knows how to use existing tax laws to minimize his tax burden.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Obama plan to let temporary Bush II tax cuts expire but keep cuts for others will help weak economy.

By Marc Jampole

We start with the fact that we have both a weak economy and a heavy debt burden.  It would be great to reduce the debt, but…

If we let the temporary tax cuts of the Bush II Administration taxes end, people will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink.

If we cut government programs which pump money into the economy, people will have less money to spend, so the economy will shrink.

How then to pay off some of our enormous national debt? 

The key to my mind is to let the Bush II tax breaks expire on money that does not create jobs. Two examples:

·        Any investment in the secondary market, which means, the buying and selling of stocks and bonds that do not result in additional funds for job-creating corporations. When you buy an initial offering of stock, the money goes to the company, but from then on, buying or selling that stock does not create any jobs, only transfers wealth between buyers and sellers.
·        The purchase of fine art and those luxury items for which high quality but less expensive substitutes are available. For example, producing a pair of luxury blue jeans costs about the same in materials and labor (including marketing) as producing a pair of quality jeans you can buy in a department store. It’s not the profit, but the costs to produce and sell that create new jobs. The enormous profit that the luxury item commands represents an exchange of wealth between the wealthy person buying the jeans and the wealthy people who own the company, but no additional jobs.

My point is that the more money you make, the more of what you make gets put into assets that do not create jobs or create relatively few jobs for the money spent. Virtually everything that the poor and the near poor make goes right back into the economy, as does most of what the middle class makes. It is only the wealthy and near wealthy who can keep much of their money out of the job-producing economy.

That’s why President Obama is absolutely spot on to propose letting the Bush II cuts expire, but only on those with incomes of more than $250,000.  As the President said earlier this week, “These tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth.”

As with any proposal to increase regulation or raise taxes on the wealthy or near wealthy, a major thrust of the Republican reaction is to invoke “small business.”  And as always, Democrats fall for it, hook, line and sinker and thereby let Republicans control the terms of the debate. This week, for example, there have been dueling versions of how many small business owners would have to start paying the additional taxes if the Bush II cuts expire for those earning more than $250,000: The President’s people say it’s a mere 3% who will have their taxes return to what they were before Bush II and Congress went “bat-Cantor crazy”; whereas the Republicans (purposely misunderstanding a detail of a non-partisan report) aver that it’s 50%. The very definition of small business is up for question: for Small Business Administration purposes, it covers businesses that have as many as 1,500employees and sell as much as $21.5 million a year. Sounds pretty big to me.

The entire small business argument is nothing more than a smoke screen. Whether one owns a small business, is a high-powered attorney, plays a professional sport or runs a public company, does it really matter how the money is earned? $250,000 is a lot of money to earn in one year, more than 98% of the population makes.  In our troubled time, it’s not too much to ask people to pay in taxes what they used to pay before the disastrous Bush II Administration. 

Friday, July 6, 2012

Gas Price Conspirators

Pete Kotz writes in Seattle Weekly about the forces in Wall Street and Washington who work to keep up the price of oil and gasoline at the pump.

16 museums dedicated to teaching creationism pockmark the American landscape.

By Marc Jampole

Secular humanist that I am, I couldn’t contain a squeaky chortle of glee when reading that the Creation Museum in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati is in financial distress. Attendance is down more than 30% from its opening year of 2007. It’s having trouble raising the $20 million it needs to build a giant Noah’s Ark theme park.

The Creation Museum uses interactive exhibits to brainwash children and uneducated adults to believe that the Earth was formed by a conscious deity about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once inhabited the same ecosystem at the same time.  The museum, whose theme line is “Prepare to believe,” was built by a ministry called Answers in Genesis, founded, like the Murdoch right-wing media empire, in Australia.

The museum blames the bad economy for the slowdown in business. Of course the museum operates with one hand tied behind its back, since no public school classes are allowed to send field trips there because it would run counter to the Supreme Court decision that keeps religion outside the classroom. Imagine how well the Creation Museum would be doing if could get on the public school field trip gravy train.

I’m wondering if the problem isn’t that it has to face brutal competition. I’m not talking about from Disney and Universal Studios, which are dedicated to the religion of consumerism. I mean competition from the other museums that want us to believe in an unscientific and false view of the physical world. After all, there are now 16 museums in the United States dedicated to the false notion ofcreationism, including:

·         Creation Museum – KY
·         7 Wonders Museum – WA
·         A Key Encounter Nature Theatre and Planetarium – FL
·         Akron Fossils and Science Center – OH
·         Creation Adventure Museum – FL
·         Creation Discovery Museum – FL
·         Creation Evidence Museum – TX
·         The Discovery Center – TX
·         Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum – MT
·         Grand River Museum – SD
·         Lost World Museum – NY
·         Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum – TX
·         Wyatt Archaeological Museum – TN
·         Camp Sunrise Museum – GA
·         Creation and Earth History Museum – CA
·         Museum of Earth History – TX

You’d think there would be plenty of paying customers for everyone, what with a recent Gallup poll showing that 46% of all Americans believe that a god created humans in their current form, while another 32% think that whatever the process of evolution, it got a good nudge from a deity. That’s an enormous target market.

The creationist museum is a very much a phenomenon of the South. Of the 16 museums dedicated to creationism, 11 are in the South, with 3 in attraction-rich Florida and 4 deep in the heart of all things conservative, Texas.

Yet, despite the fact that Gallup found only 15% of the population endorsing the scientific view that humans evolved with the intervention of a deity, museums that advocate Darwinism, such as the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (4 million visitors a year) and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (1.3 million visitors a year), draw more people. No creationist museum comes close to these numbers. It’s probably because those damn yankees stole all the best dinosaur specimens. 

To believe that a god created us is harmless enough until it is used to defend pollution-causing activities or war. I also have no problem with building institutions full of pretty pictures and exhibits dedicated to religious contemplation and then charging people an entrance fee to see. Maybe it works a little better when the entry fees are voluntary donations, which has been the game for the Catholic Church for about 2,000 years.

What I find pernicious to the intellectual health of the collective body of the American people is to pass off this nature-centric religion as science, which is what all these museums attempt to do. In one way or another, they all use facts and what they call analysis to provide what they call scientific proof of the intervention of a god in the creation or development of human beings. To ask the “god” question is inherently unscientific (which is why calling the Higgs boson a “god particle” is so unfortunate). Science exists outside the world of gods, because it is based solely on observation and not a priori theories of existence. Science looks for consistent rules that exist through time and does not care who or what created the rules, just how they work.

Thus, it’s their pretentions to science that make these creation museums unethical. 

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

By rejecting state health insurance exchange, GOP governors increase the scope of federal government

By Marc Jampole

These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother’s death at the age of 49.  When he fell from a ladder and smashed his brains on the concrete below, he was worth about $100.  Yet he got the finest, most high-tech treatment available by first class specialists who respected and maintained his life until it was hopeless, then cut out his useable parts for the living.

And it was all free.

The best medical treatment in the world for free—and he got it at the Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which was founded in 1736 and at one time was the second largest hospital in the country. It never reopened after Hurricane Katrina, most assuredly for political reasons.

My thoughts have turned to the wonderful care my brother received because of the announcement by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal that he wasacting for the entire state and rejecting key portions of the Affordable CareAct. How far has Louisiana fallen when it comes to taking care of its citizens!

Jindal has now been joined by his fellow right-wingideologue Florida Governor Richard Scott, who is also rejecting those portions of the new health care law over which the states have control.   

In the case of both of the provisions that Jindal and Scott have rejected, the governors are cutting off the noses of their constituencies to spite their own faces in a near paroxysm of ideological purity.

First, their refusal to construct state health insurance exchanges (HIX), which are state markets on which different insurance companies offer policies built on state-mandated standards to uninsured citizens of the state.  The Affordable Care Act gives every state the option to create an HIX, but the citizens of those states who decide not to create one will be able to buy insurance on the federal version. In other words, by blocking Louisiana and Florida HIXs, Jindal and Scott are directly leading to an increase in federal government intervention on a state level because people who would have bought insurance through a state HIX will now go to the federal HIX.  I guess their opposition to social service programs to help the needy supersedes their dedication to states’ rights.

Ideological purity will lead to a net transfer of money from the pockets of Louisianans and Floridians because their governors are also rejecting an increase in the Medicare program.

I get it that both would like to replace Medicare with either a voucher system or, alternatively, end all government support of health care for the elderly.  But let’s look at the facts on the ground: Medicare as it exists right now is being expanded to serve millions of new people.  All of this expansion will be completely financed on the short term by the federal government and mostly financed by the feds in the long run. For every dollar that a state puts into the expansion in the future, it will receive many, many dollars from the feds both now and later. All of this money will go to making their citizens healthier.  Moreover, the citizens of every state will have to pay taxes to support the Medicare expansion, whether or not they receive the benefits.  Thus, by refusing to participate, a state is making its citizens pay for the health care of the citizens of other states. 

In both refusals, the good governors are perversely working against their own cause. By not creating an HIX, they increase federal government control of the local health insurance market using federal not state standards. By turning down the Medicare expansion, they take money out of the pockets of their citizens and give it to the citizens of other states, a de facto tax increase with no benefit to those taxed—just the kind of thing about which Rick and Bobby like to pontificate.

Laughable on the level of ideas, but truly tragic when we think of the hundreds of thousands of people in these two states who will not get adequate health care because of these heartless ideologues.  It’s a sad day for both Louisiana and Florida.
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