End of This Blog

I have just discovered that Google has quietly enabled "per country" censorship of blog posts on this Blogger service. Therefore, I have stopped all blogging. I will not be part of Google's compliance with dictatorships and the suppression of human rights.

From Wired magazine:

Google to Censor Blogger Blogs on a ‘Per Country Basis’

By David Kravets January 31, 2012

Google has quietly announced changes to its Blogger free-blogging platform that will enable the blocking of content only in countries where censorship is required.

Twitter announced technology last week addressing the same topic. It said it had acquired the ability to censor tweets in the countries only where it was ordered removed, instead of on an internet-wide basis.

Twitter’s announcement via its blog sparked a huge online backlash. The microblogging service was accused of becoming a censoring agent.

Yet Google’s announcement three weeks ago — buried in a Blogger help page — went unnoticed until it was highlighted by TechDows on Tuesday.

This censorship by Google puts the lie to its supposed corporate code of conduct of "Don't be evil".

In fact Google is just another greedy corporation that blows smoke about social concerns and "putting the customer first" when in reality their only bottom line is corporate greed.

I'm disillusioned. I foolishly believed that ethical corporations can be run with a mandate to service three critical stakeholders: their shareholders, their workers, and the broader community that provides the matrix (the legal infrastructure, the transportation infrastructure, the educational infrastructure, the energy infrastructure, etc.) which makes capitalism possible.

But Google has proved that my idealism is poorly supported by facts on the ground. Instead, greed and evil is endemic in capitalism and Google has shown itself to be just another greedy corrupt and evil corporation.

Goodbye.

Selling Social Darwinism

Robert Reich has a blog that is well worth following. He is a knowledgeable person with the facts and the social empathy to present an honest account of the situation that the 99% find themselves in.

Here is his latest post:

The Republican Myth of Obama's "Entitlement Society"

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

They have cause and effect backwards. The reason for the rise in food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other safety-net programs is Americans got clobbered in 2008 with the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression. They and their families have needed whatever helping hands they could get.

If anything, America’s safety nets have been too small and shot through with holes. That’s why the number and percentage of Americans in poverty has increased dramatically over the past three years, including over a third of families with young children.

One scandal, for example, is that only 40 percent of the unemployed qualify for unemployment benefits because they weren’t working full time or long enough on a single job before they were canned. The unemployment system doesn’t take account of the fact that a large portion of the workforce typically works part time on several jobs, and moves from job to job.

Republicans also object to Obama’s health care law, which covers 30 million more Americans than were covered before. But it still leaves over 20 million without health insurance. They’ll get emergency care when they’re in dire straights — hospitals won’t refuse them — but we all end up paying indirectly.

Regressive Republicans pretend they’re about opportunity. In reality they’re back at what they’ve been doing for years — promoting Social Darwinism.

Go read his blog.

The manipulation of statistics to sell their Social Darwinism is utterly cynical. The political right knows that it is lying. It isn't naive. But it trusts in the big lie technique. They know that if they repeat their right wing lies long enough and through enough media, most people will assume it is true because the message is so prevalent.

I remember being incredulous when I matured and discovered that my father believed that if something was printed it had to be true. In his mind, nobody would go to the expense of printing something unless it was true. I could never change his mind. He proved to me just how effective a propaganda campaign could be. He lived a life believing falsehoods simply because "they were printed" and I could never change his mind because my arguments were "just words" and he refused to look at the printed material I presented to him. Propaganda can be very, very effective.

Quote of the Day

Here is a snippet from the book Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, a book with an endlessly fascinating take on money, debt, and markets over the long history of civilization:

Another way to look at this might be to say that the new age [1450-1971, the Age of Great Capitalist Empires] came to be increasingly uncomfortable with the political nature of money. Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, politics is very similar to magic -- one reason both politics and magic tend, just ab out everywhere, to be surrounded by a certain halo of fraud

I highly recommend Graeber's book for an alternative analysis of money, debt, and markets. You may not agree with his analysis, but he will help you broaden your understanding through his deep understanding of anthropology/history deeply rooted in 5,000 years of human civilization.

Painting a False Reality

Here is an excellent example of how the right wing media in the US (especially Fox "News") uses its power to rant and lie to plant false ideas to manipulate the population into holding views that allow right wing politicians to mobilize the public to control elections:



If you watch the video you can see Bill O'Reilly frustrated by being caught in his lies and says in exasperation that he doesn't care what the facts are, he just "knows" that it is bad there and that this evil is coming to get America. In short, despite the facts, he continues to sell his right wing scare story. He isn't a "news" reporter. He is a propagandist selling a story to prop up a political viewpoint.

How Media Misleads

Even public media like NPR misleads the consumer of its "news". Here is an excellent example by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

NPR Editorializes Against Growth In Europe

A Morning Edition segment on the recent European Union summit was headlined, "Most EU Nations to Sign Pact to Stop Overspending." This is both flat-out wrong and misleading.

It is flat-out wrong because the pact restricts deficits, not spending. It is misleading because it implies that the current crisis was caused by overspending. It wasn't. Most of the crisis countries had declining debt to GDP ratios before the downturn and two, Spain and Ireland, were actually running budget surpluses. The problem was caused by housing bubbles and the inept management of the economy by the European Central Bank.

If the media lies, then a representative government is impossible. And that makes the constitutional requirement for a free press a waste of effort. At least a significant majority of the press must be honest enough to tell the truth. A free press can be honest or sold out. The hope of the writers of the US Constitution was that the media was so fragmented and numerous that it would be impossible to manipulate the press as a whole. But the writers of the US Constitution lived in a simpler time when the US press was more like the bloggers of today: numerous and cheap to set up. They didn't envision "big media" with wall-to-wall coverage and a practical monopoly on the public's attention.

The coming of radio made possible the horrible dictators of the 1930s. The monopolization of the media in the late 20th century made possible the overweening power of right wing politics today. It took WWII to break the power of the dictators and give back popular democracies. What will it take to break the present day monopoly of big media and the rampant right wing politics that have created?

Looking Through Lovely Libertarian Glasses

When I was a kid the big complain was the bizarro world painted by "socialist realism". The hyped and deeply false world view sold by the commies.

Today the world is pervaded by its bizarro world version of reality, the kool-aid of Ayn Rand, that worships the individual and ignores any gummy social cohesion or social obligation. It is every man for himself in the wonder world of the political right. No mushy leftist "it takes a village to raise a child" in the libertarian worldview.

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that shows the application of this libertarian "individualist realism" to politics in the US:

Mr. Daniels first berated the president for his “constant disparagement of people in business,” which happens to be a complete fabrication. Mr. Obama has never done anything of the sort. He went on: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the president borrowed and blew.”

...

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

...

Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

But the current Republican worldview has no room for such considerations. From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.

...

So we should be grateful to Mr. Daniels for his remarks Tuesday. He got his facts wrong, but he did, unintentionally, manage to highlight an important philosophical difference between the parties. One side believes that economies succeed solely thanks to heroic entrepreneurs; the other has nothing against entrepreneurs, but believes that entrepreneurs need a supportive environment, and that sometimes government has to help create or sustain that supportive environment.

And the view that it takes more than business heroes is the one that fits the facts.

For some reason most people want a cartoon cut-out version of reality. They want a simplified story that consoles them with a happy ending. The real world, just like Nature, is totally indifferent to humans, their aspirations, their needs, or their ideological fantasies. The real world is "red in tooth and claw" because it is so different from the normal human social world of cooperation and empathy. Humans have the ability to create a safe harbour from the cruelties of the world. Sadly, right wing nuts want to destroy the paradise and replace it with a fantasy of "the big man" who creates and destroys for his own pleasure with indifference to others. That is a cruel reality that is offered up by the libertarians as a "better future". Nuts!

Neville Chamberlain, the Hero

You would think in 70 years the world would "progress" and leaders would have incorporated the lessons of the past and we would have a better world.

But, as Brad DeLong points out, despite Chamberlain's horrible appeasement policy with Hitler, he did get one thing right which leaders today in the UK have got horribly wrong:

Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly returning to its previous level of output, thanks to Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain’s reliance on fiscal stimulus to restore the price level to its pre-depression trajectory.

Compare that approach to the expansion-through-austerity policy being pursued nowadays by British Prime Minister David Cameron’s government (with Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne leading the cheering squad). The country’s real GDP has flat-lined, and the odds are high that British real GDP is headed down again.

Indeed, in less than a year, if current forecasts are correct, Britain’s Cameron-Osborne Depression will not merely be the worst depression in Britain since the Great Depression, but probably the worst depression in Britain…ever.

Willful Ignorance

Here is a bit from a NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman that slams what he calls "the serious people", the ideological right, that has called for austerity as the magic elixir for recovering from the worldwide George Bush-induced Depression:

How could the economy thrive when unemployment was already high, and government policies were directly reducing employment even further? Confidence! “I firmly believe,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet — at the time the president of the European Central Bank, and a strong advocate of the doctrine of expansionary austerity — “that in the current circumstances confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery, because confidence is the key factor today.”

Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Thus in October 2010 David Broder, who virtually embodied conventional wisdom, praised Mr. Cameron for his boldness, and in particular for “brushing aside the warnings of economists that the sudden, severe medicine could cut short Britain’s economic recovery and throw the nation back into recession.” He then called on President Obama to “do a Cameron” and pursue “a radical rollback of the welfare state now.”

Strange to say, however, those warnings from economists proved all too accurate. And we’re quite fortunate that Mr. Obama did not, in fact, do a Cameron.

Which is not to say that all is well with U.S. policy. True, the federal government has avoided all-out austerity. But state and local governments, which must run more or less balanced budgets, have slashed spending and employment as federal aid runs out — and this has been a major drag on the overall economy. Without those spending cuts, we might already have been on the road to self-sustaining growth; as it is, recovery still hangs in the balance.

And we may get tipped in the wrong direction by Continental Europe, where austerity policies are having the same effect as in Britain, with many signs pointing to recession this year.

The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

The tragedy is that policy makers and right wing economists prefer lies and "the confidence fairy" more than the simple truth and hard won economic truths. The economics profession has shown itself to be in the hands of charlatans who are willing to corrupt truths won from the Great Depression experience in order to push a political agenda. Tragic!

As always it is the bottom 99% who die when the 1% "generals" order a charge into an open field where they are gunned down by withering machine gun fire (aka reality). But the generals blame the troops and order up another charge. The 99% are expendable. Everybody knows that the 1% are the "cream of society" and must be protected in their ideological bubble at all costs.

Why the Media is Useless

Here is a post by Dean Baker in his Beat the Press blog:

The Post devoted a business section article to Newt Gingrich's supply side economics. It would have been useful to note the findings of the research on this topic, for example this Congressional Budget Office study. It found that even in a best case scenario the additional growth sparked by a tax cut could replace less than a third of the lost tax revenue. Even this effect would be temporary, with slower growth in later years implying larger deficits.

The Post should not just throw Gingrich's assertions out to readers as though they might be true. There is extensive research on this topic which the Post's business reporters should be familiar, its readers almost certainly are not.

A democracy works only if it has an informed electorate. The reason why "the press" was acknowledged and highlighted in the First Amendment to the Constitution. A free press is important. But a commercial press that prints only what corporations and the rich elite want the people to hear is not a truly "free" press. The Constitution called for "freedom of the press". Only with a free press that prints facts, truths, revelations, analysis, criticism will the electorate be empowered to vote responsibly.

Sadly, Dean Baker is pointing out that the US now fails the test of democracy. The US is rapidly becoming a banana republic.

For the Love of Art

It is amazing what people will do for the love of art (and maybe a cash payout)...

Mortgage Fraud: A Glimmer of Hope

Here is an interview of Matt Taibbi:

Mortgages: Canada vs. US

Here is a bit by Sherry Cooper, chief economist for the Bank of Montreal. From BMO's weekly publication Focus:

Amid concern about a Canadian housing bubble, the question of the financial strength of the major Canadian mortgage insurer, CMHC, has come to the forefront. The bottom line is that CMHC is solid. CMHC has very prudent underwriting standards and the quality of its insured mortgage portfolio is strong. The rate of delinquencies is very low and stable, remaining in line with the levels for Canadian banks—under 0.5%, compared to 8% in the U.S.

CMHC is governed by a Board of Directors and accountable to Parliament through the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development. As a Crown corporation, CMHC is also required to meet a number of governance and accountability requirements under the Financial Administration Act and the CMHC Act.

CMHC’s capital is funded by its insurance premiums, fees and investment income on the securitization portfolio of the Canada Housing Trust (CHT). It holds capital at a level nearly three times the mandatory minimum level set by OSFI to protect Canadian taxpayers from the costs arising from the risk of mortgage defaults1. CMHC has an internal (self-imposed) capital target of 150% of the OSFI Minimum Capital Test (MCT) and a capital holding target of 200% of MCT. In addition, they maintain additional capital reserves in retained earnings and unearned premiums and fees.

If CMHC is uncomfortable with the terms of a mortgage loan presented by lenders, then mitigating measures, such as an additional down payment or reduced amortization, would be requested—the minimum standard for the latter was officially reduced in Q1 of last year.

CMHC is also subject to stress testing for extreme circumstances similar to the banks. Even under the most extreme tests, with house prices plunging 30% and the economy going into a deep recession (with spiking interest rates—highly unlikely), CMHC comes through without relying on taxpayer funding.

Indeed, historically, CMHC earns an annual budget surplus that reduces the federal government’s outstanding deficit. Over the last decade, CMHC contributed over $14 billion to the government’s coffers.

The difference between Canada and America is very simple: Canadians believe in government and our regulators take their job seriously. In the US the people hate government and taxes and the regulators drank the kool-aid of "deregulation". Simply put: Canada believes in civil society while the US is a Hobbesian struggle of all-against-all.

A Real Bird's Eye View

Technology marches on with fancy new airborne platforms for fancy camera shots...

Brain in a Box

There is no ghost in the machine. It is turtles all the way down. Or as Julien Offray de La Mettrie put it Man a Machine:



The above needs to be tempered. Our positivist and reductionist scientific worldview makes claims that go too far for a pragmatist. From a section in Lecture 47 of Daniel N. Robinson's The Great Ideas of Philosophy, 2^nd Edition:

[William] James the pluralist is not a relativist of the modern stripe. He countered the reigning positivism of his day with fallibilism. There is always more to the account than any current version can include, because there are always other experiences, other beliefs, and needs. We must conduct ourselves in such a way as to record what we take to be our highest interests, while never knowing if we have them right or have matched our interests by our actions. There is no final word.

William James was, above all, a realist: We must accept what is. Unlike the positivists, however, James took this to mean that we must accept that there is a religious element to life, because credible report points to the existence of one, as well as to a striving to perfect oneself and to needs that go beyond the individual soul or body. There are, however, things that we cannot finally know. The fallibilist doesn't deny that there is some absolute point of focus on which human interests can converge, but we are warned to be suspicious of those who come to us with final answers.

The most profound lesson of modernism is to recognize the limits of our reason, the limits to knowlege, and the ultimate fallibility or each of us. The existentialist is right in noting that we project ourselves into our future with a hope that has no foundation. In the end we all die, but we live as if we would live forever. We theorize as if there is "ultimate truth" when in fact we live in a very small corner of an inconceivably huge universe in which we don't even know how many physical dimensions exist or whether there are other "universes out there" beyond our ken.

In some deep sense we are a "brain in a box" but science has not plumbed the depths of what this means. Yes, we are "only" matter in motion. But that matter, the brain, is so infinitely more complex than a figure like de La Mettrie had not a hint of what it truly means. And just as de La Mettrie claimed more than he really knew, so today's scientists and philosophers make claims far beyond what will be ultimately revealed. The universe is far more complex and mysterious than the human mind will ever comprehend. But that doesn't mean that we don't enjoy the quest. Knowledge and truth are still the shining lights on high that we strive to attain.

America Has a Choice of Victims

Maureen Dowd has a good op-ed in the NY Times in which she looks at the Obamas since of "underappreciation" by the American public. Then she widens it to include Newt Gingerich who feels he is similarly underappreciated and misprepresented by the press:

The Obamas, especially Michelle, have radiated the sense that Americans do not appreciate what they sacrifice by living in a gilded cage. They’ve forgotten Rule No. 1 of politics: No one sheds tears for anyone lucky enough to live at the White House. And after four or eight years of public service, you are assured membership in the 1 percent club.

The Obamas truly feel like victims. But Newt Gingrich, who campaigns by attacking the culture of victimization, plays one on stage. He soared at the Charleston CNN debate by brazenly proclaiming himself the victim of “the elite media protecting Barack Obama” (the same Obama who told Time he was victimized by the press). Newt’s gambit was a calculated way of deflecting attention from a charge by his second wife, Marianne, that the family values he preaches are hypocritical platitudes, given his cheating ways with two wives he divorced when they were ill.

Could 2012, remarkably, be a race between two powerful victims yearning to be lonely at the top?

This is ridiculous. A leader needs to be psychological secure and have a joy in backslapping and glad-handing with people. But the dsyfunctional US political system is giving the American people a choice between flub and flop in the November poll.

Voting in introverts, narcissists, or those who see themselves as victims is asking for perverted politics and a poisoned civil society.

Tilting at Windmills

Here is Robert Reich, ex-Secretary of Labor under Clinton making a call from the political left for people to take back control of their government from the corruption of money and power by corporations and the ultra-rich.



Sadly, it looks like the plutocrats have got things pretty well sewn up and only if there is real revolution with blood in the streets will the clock be turned back to a true republic. The US over the last few decades has passed over the Rubicon and like the age of Imperial Rome, there is a pretense of "republican" government, but the real control is in the hands of very few, very very rich people. There is no going back. There is only collapse and decay in America's future. I've given up any pretense of optimism. Dark days are ahead.

Clay Shirky on America's Proposed Insane Property Rights

Here is Clay Shirky talking about SOPA and PIPA:

How the US Plans to Nuke the Rest of the World

The SOPA/PIPA legislation is in effect a "weapon of mass destruction" that will easily destroy the world as we know it. Here is a very nice description of just how dangerous and "creepy" the proposed SOPA and PIPA laws are:



The above is just one of many, many wonderful instructional videos available from the Khan Academy.

From Wikipedia:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching Mathematics, History, Healthcare & Medicine, Finance, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Economics, Cosmology and Computer Science.

Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

Selling Black is White, Up is Down

Here is a bit from a post by Robert Reich that nails the big lie that the political right in the US is selling to gullible electors:

Mitt Romney is casting the 2012 campaign as “free enterprise on trial” – defining free enterprise as achieving success through “hard work and risking-taking.” Tea-Party favorite Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina says he’s supporting Romney because “we really need someone who understands how risk, taking risk … is the way we create jobs, create choices, expand freedom.” Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donahue, defending Romney, explains “this economy is about risk. If you don’t take risk, you can’t have success.”

Wait a minute. Who do they think are bearing the risks? Their blather about free enterprise risk-taking has it upside down. The higher you go in the economy, the easier it is to make money without taking any personal financial risk at all. The lower you go, the bigger the risks.

Wall Street has become the center of riskless free enterprise. Bankers risk other peoples’ money. If deals turn bad, they collect their fees in any event. The entire hedge-fund industry is designed to hedge bets so big investors can make money whether the price of assets they bet on rises or falls. And if the worst happens, the biggest bankers and investors now know they’ll be bailed out by taxpayers because they’re too big to fail.

But the worst examples of riskless free enteprise are the CEOs who rake in millions after they screw up royally.

Near the end of 2007, Charles Prince resigned as CEO of Citgroup after announcing the bank would need an additional $8 billion to $11 billion in write-downs related to sub-prime mortgages gone bad. Prince left with a princely $30 million in pension, stock awards, and stock options, along with an office, car, and a driver for five years.

Stanley O’Neal’s five-year tenure as CEO of Merrill Lynch ended about the same time, when it became clear Merrill would have to take tens of billions in write-downs on bad sub-prime mortgages and be bought up at a fire-sale price by Bank of America. O’Neal got a payout worth $162 million.

Philip Purcell, who left Morgan Stanley in 2005 after a shareholder revolt against him, took away $43.9 million plus $250,000 a year for life.

...

But as economic risk-taking has declined at the top, it’s been increasing at the middle and below. More than 20 percent of the American workforce is now “contingent” – temporary workers, contractors, independent consultants – with no security at all.

Even full-time workers who have put in decades with a company can now find themselves without a job overnight – with no parachute, no help finding another job, and no health insurance.

Meanwhile the proportion of large and medium-sized companies (200 or more workers) offering full health care coverage continues to drop – from 74 percent in 1980 to under 10 percent today. Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of large and medium-sized employers also provided health insurance to their retirees. Now, fewer than 15 percent do.

The risk of getting old with no pension is also rising. In 1980, more than 80 percent of large and medium-sized firms gave their workers “defined-benefit” pensions that guaranteed a fixed amount of money every month after they retired. Now it’s down to under 10 percent. Instead, they offer “defined contribution” plans where the risk is on the workers. When the stock market tanks, as it did in 2008, the 401(k) plan tanks along with it. Today, a third of all workers with defined-benefit plans contribute nothing, which means their employers don’t either.

And the risk of losing earnings continues to grow. Even before the crash of 2008, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics at University of Michigan found that over any given two-year stretch about half of all families experienced some decline in income. And the downturns were becoming progressively larger. In the 1970s, the typical drop was about 25 percent. By late 1990s, it was 40 percent. By the mid-2000s, family incomes rose and fell twice as much as they did in the mid-1970s, on average.

What Romney and the cheerleaders of risk-taking free enterprise don’t want you to know is the risks of the economy have been shifting steadily away from CEOs and Wall Street – and on to average working people. It’s not just income and wealth that are surging to the top. Economic security is moving there as well, leaving the rest of us stranded.

Go read the whole post.

Pundits like to push the idea that "you get the government you deserve". But the reality is that the average voter doesn't have the time or resources to follow the political fluff thrown at him and sort the wheat from the chaff. When a corrupt political party like the Republicans in the US (and to a lesser degree the Democrats) deliberately sell a false message, it is very hard for the average person to uncover the truth.