Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Elections matter!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

With Obama in, we now have hope for international cooperation on global warming!

NY Times: “But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”

That treaty, officials and climate experts involved in the negotiations say, will significantly differ from the agreement of a decade ago, reaching beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions and including financial mechanisms and making good on longstanding promises to provide money and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change.

Right on!  Lets be cool!

see:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/science/earth/01treaty.html?_r=1&hp

Chomsky on Hegemony or Survival

chasdarwinLeave a comment

MIT Professor, author, scholar and philosopher Noam Chomsky:

“The survival of the human species is by no means an obvious thing. There are very severe threats to survival. We learn about them all the time. The threat of environmental destruction is much too real to put to the side. The threat of destruction by weapons of mass destruction — that has come very close many times. We just learned at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, a terminal nuclear war was averted by one word by one submarine commander who countermanded the order to send off nuclear missiles. ”

… So, survival of the species is by no means a sure thing. Decent survival. Well, what’s hegemony? Hegemony has to do with the domination of the International system by small sectors of power. At the moment there happens to be one superpower, but it does not dominate the rest of the world in all dimensions, but overwhelmingly dominates it in one dimension: Namely, the military dimension.  Unfortunately, if you look at the factors that surround hegemony, the short term goals to maximize profit, to increase control of the world and so on, and ask how those goals will play out, turns out they do threaten survival,” said Chomsky.

Let us work, in this Brave New World of domestic sanity and international diplomacy that is the Obama administration, toward survival, writes this author. 

From Raw Story:

 http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Chomsky_Humanitys_survival_by_no_means_0227.html

Out of the Wilderness, Up from supply side economics

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From the NY Times( DAVID LEONHARDT) :

“The budget that President Obama proposed on Thursday is nothing less than an attempt to end a three-decade era of economic policy dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and his supporters.

The Obama budget — a bold, even radical departure from recent history, wrapped in bureaucratic formality and statistical tables — would sharply raise taxes on the rich, beyond where Bill Clinton had raised them. It would reduce taxes for everyone else, to a lower point than they were under either Mr. Clinton or George W. Bush. And it would lay the groundwork for sweeping changes in health care and education, among other areas.

More than anything else, the proposals seek to reverse the rapid increase in economic inequality over the last 30 years. They do so first by rewriting the tax code and, over the longer term, by trying to solve some big causes of the middle-class income slowdown, like high medical costs and slowing educational gains.”

The author, having read David Stockman’s book, hesitates to credit Reagan with anything likeideas or policy, as he clearly did not even understand either word.

“Happy Days are here again!”

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/business/economy/27policy.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

A bad week for the GOP is a good week for you & me

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From:Huff Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-jenkins/worst-week-ever-republica_b_170378.html

“When Republicans suffered a disastrous beating in November’s election, it would have been fair to assume that things could not get worse for them: the-most-liberal-Senator was to be president, Nancy-Pelosi-from-San-Francisco was going to lead a massive Democratic majority in the House, and assorted socialists were going to run things. That was bad, yes, but this week, just like the stock market (funny how that goes), Republicans hit yet a new low. In recent days, Republican leaders were called cheesy, off-putting, disastrous, untrustworthy, and inconsequential, not by Democrats, but by their party’s own members, from high-profile commentators to Governors.

The highlight of the GOP week was, of course, Governor Bobby Jindal’s response to Barack Obama’s Congressional address. The best that can be said for Jindal’s performance is that it channeled Kenneth the Page from 30 Rock, presumably not the objective, even for someone who willingly changed his name to “Bobby.” ”

As the author is not hip to ’30 Rock’ (Rock yes, 30 no), I don’t dig the Page ref, but love the verbage.

Dawn of a New Progressive Era!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

Krugman’s column in the 27 Feb NY Times: “President Obama’s new budget represents a huge break, not just with the policies of the past eight years, but with policy trends over the past 30 years. If he can get anything like the plan he announced on Thursday through Congress, he will set America on a fundamentally new course.”

These are encouraging words: its time to bring back working families to America.

see:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/opinion/27krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

What we need now is Big, Good Government

chasdarwinLeave a comment
What enabled the US to survive the (previous) Great Depression, come out of World War II with the strongest economy and military in the world, expand that economy through three post war decades, and win the Space Race?   Big Government did, through: the New Deal Programs; the World War II military, civilian, and industrial programs; the GI Bill;and the NASA space programs, among others.  
What we have to avoid is not Big Government, but Bad Government, and currently we need Big Government to solve the Big Problems that we have inherited from Bad Government.   

David Sirota: Nationalization – not just for the kommies any more!

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From HuffPost, David Sirota writes:

‘ Amidst the punditocracy’s handwringing about the supposedly unprecedented possibility of nationalization in America, Paul Krugman this week reminded his New York Times readers that nationalization is “as American as apple pie.”‘

…

” So the next time you hear Rush Limbaugh or some teevee pundit blathering on about the economic crisis and claiming nationalization is dangerous and un-American, remember: nationalization is everywhere in America, and has been for a long time – and it has worked quite well when done responsibly.”   see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/nationalization-its-not-s_b_170150.html

Mr Sirota is the author of ” The Uprising”.

GOP Bias in the Three Major Networks 1992-2004

chasdarwinLeave a comment

From Huffpost (thanks to Jeff Coryell)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/24/self-censoring-journalist_n_169643.html

“The three major broadcast networks favored Republicans in elections from 1992 to 2004, according to a study that analyzed presidential campaign coverage.

That effect was largely due to journalists censoring their own reporting out of frustration at being accused of a liberal bias, according to Maria Elizabath Grabe, associate professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University College Of Arts and Sciences, who co-authored “Image Bite Politics: News And The Visual Framing Of Elections” (Oxford University Press) with fellow academic Erik Bucy.

Grabe and Bucy examined 62 hours of network news coverage – 178 newscasts – between Labor Day and Election Day over four elections and examined the visual coverage, including such package techniques as the “lip-flap shot – when a reporter’s voice is heard over video of the candidate, which tends to be unflattering for that candidate.

They also examined the “Goldilocks effect” – which party gets the last say in a piece and is better remembered by viewers.

According to their research, Democrats were more likely to be the subject of the unflattering “lip-flap” effect while GOP candidates had the last say in every election but 2004. In 1996, Republicans got the final say eight times as many times as Democrats.”

In my words: what we felt was indeed, what was happening.

For a Change, Tax the Very Rich at a Fair Rate

chasdarwin1 Comment

In the speech of this (very new) century, Our President proposed increasing the tax rate on the highest 2% of incomes.

From alternet:

“America’s super-rich are paying far less of their incomes in taxes than average Americans who punch time clocks. This is grossly unfair. The good news: Under Mr. Obama’s new plan to cut the deficit in half, the very richest Americans will start paying something closer to their fair tax share.”

“The current top tax rate on “ordinary” work income sits at 35 percent. But dividends and capital gains from the buying and selling of most assets face only a 15 percent top rate. That’s why in 2006, America’s top 400 paid just 17.2 percent of their $263 million average incomes in federal tax.

Millions of middle-class American families, once you tally income and payroll taxes, pay far more of their incomes in tax. One particularly striking example from billionaire investor Warren Buffett: In 2006, he paid 17.7 percent of his income in total taxes. His secretary, who made $60,000, paid 30 percent of hers.”

At the start of the Clinton Administration, the marginal tax rates were raised a few points, and a balancing of the budget was achieved as well as high employment.

see:http://www.alternet.org/workplace/128745

Comrade Greenspan wants us to seize the economy’s commanding height

chasdarwinLeave a comment

“O.K., not exactly. What Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman — and a staunch defender of free markets — actually said was, “It may be necessary to temporarily nationalize some banks in order to facilitate a swift and orderly restructuring.” I agree.”

Times are indeed changing, when a Princeton economist suggests in the NY Times that we might nationalize our banks…

see more:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/23/opinion/23krugman.html?ref=opinion