You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘Mitch McConnell’ category.
Where do you draw the line? This piece will philosophically roam a little I’m afraid because there is no set answer, just an amorphous mess that defies confinement if that makes sense. If it doesn’t…. here is hoping it will near the end of this writing… :)
If you can’t guess what the image is in the heading, try imagining a horizontal volume control like what is displayed in most car radios these days. On it we have unlimited choices across the realm of what we can hear and we choose where we want to draw the line….
I was reminded of this by a soon to be famous video about Seattle’s schools standing up to Kafkaesque craziness the wealthy and corporate America are foisting upon education. The video starts out with a teacher giving this analogy….
It is as if a mechanic’s boss told his mechanic to put on an inferior brake instead of one the customer had requested. The customer will not take off the wheels to inspect. The mechanic says those brake shoes have problems, they fail. they could kill. The boss says, that’s just hype. They work in China all the time. Put them on….
Now look at the scale above…… In a child’s world of right and wrong we would all expect the mechanic to say “that was wrong” and refuse to do it…. So what if he loses his job? A child would say he should still not do what was wrong and cause someone’s death… But how many of you have had to do what the boss wanted because you were in no shape to state otherwise?
That is where the sliding scale begins to come in play…. If the mechanic refuses, and boss comes out and says, “leave right now, You were insubordinate and I just fired you”…. his spouse is going to say…”What, now we have no money. Why didn’t you just put the damn things on!” His parents are going to say..” Kid, sometimes an adult has to make adult decisions. It doesn’t matter what right or wrong is; it matters what right or wrong is for you. Sorry, can’t help you”. His future job interviewer is going to say; “your former boss said he fired you for insubordination and you have a no re-hire attached to your name. Sorry, can’t hire you.” And your drinking buddies are going to say; ”Oh as soon as you left, he got Jacobson to put those cheap brakes on anyway. You lost your job for nothing…” The arbitrator at your unemployment hearing is going to say “We found the charges of insubordination substantiated; repeal denied.”…. No job. No money. Hungry family.
So standing up for what is right really doesn’t pay in today’s corporate controlled world, now. Does it? It is good story, but works lousy in real life.
So on the slider above, where would you fall? Where would you be? If you try to act like you would refuse to do wrong, you are probably a liar. If you swear you will always do the right and moral thing, you are naive, and probably also a liar. If you insist you would stand up to that boss, you are a simpleton who really doesn’t know much about life, and don’t need the job to survive.
So on the slider unit above, if the far left is standing up for what is right and immediately refusing and the far right is willingly follow the bosses direction right away… which would be you?
Probably for the most part you would be somewhere in the middle, you will say so if you are being true to yourself… You would probably argue once, twice, or maybe three times against it, and you might agree in theory, but in work, not follow through with that agreement, or you might just say “ok boss” and then still install the good brake pads.
But if you did, what about the next time. What about the discrepancy in inventory? Sooner or later it will catch up to you… And then you’ll be fired.
Or you could decided that you follow orders and if your boss made such an order, all results would have to fall on him and not you, and if anyone was to be liable and get caught up if any harm came out of it, it would be him; so you would follow his command and install the inferior parts…
If you are trying to figure out a way to win this, to come up with a perfect spot on this horizontal dial whether it is the far right, far left, center, middle right, middle left, sadly there isn’t a right way… For depending on which way you view the problem, both are right…. As you go to the right, you look bad from the left. As you go to the left, you look bad from the right. If you are in the middle, you look bad to both, just not as bad as the others at the far end of the spectrum…
There is no way to win.
Except to have the boss never ask you to substitute cheap parts instead of ones ordered by the car’s owner….
That is the trick.
Now here is what we are being asked to do.
- Lower our standards of education for all students.
- Eliminate tuition for all veterans returning from Afghanistan.
- 125,000 individuals and families put at risk of becoming homeless
- 100,000 formerly homeless people might be removed from emergency shelters or other housing arrangements
- Defer maintenance and leave highly necessary staff vacancies open.
- Because rents are so high, many of these families may, quite literally, find themselves out on the street.
- Significant cuts, including ones that deliver hot meals to the elderly and another that helps pregnant women.
- Cuts to the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children known as WIC, which provides food and baby formula for at-risk families. 775,000 low-income women and their children might lose access to or be denied that aid because of the mandatory cuts…
- Cuts to programs that aid children with special needs; job-training programs that help unemployed people find a new career; foreclosure prevention services; and programs that help 150,000 veterans every year make the transition into the nonmilitary work force.
- Reduction in jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed..
- Cut 20% of every military person’s pay.
And why are we being asked to do this? So the financier’s of the Republican Party like the brake business owner, can make more money……
But this time we do have a choice…. We hire and fire the boss…. Should we fire the Republican bosses? And replace them with those who have still carry American morals, and not third world ones?
Where do you want your children to see you, when they look at the sliding moral scale above?
Everyone who has followed me knows I’m always right on the market. I’m not putting up links but you can go back through the archives and verify all you want.
If you have a mutual fund that allows you to switch from stocks to secured investments like Treasury’s, put the order in now. The smart money is starting to pull out now and the stocks will start dropping and keep falling as long as the switching continues….
Here is the reason….
Mitch McConnell…. “It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester is going to go into effect…Read my lips: I’m not interested in an 11th-hour negotiation.”
The most liberal estimate shows that when the sequester goes into effect the GDP will lose .5% over the course of the year. This first Quarter will be positive which means the next three quarters will be in negative territory.
The exact same thing occurred in 1937. It is usually lumped in by history as a continuation of the Great Depression but two quarters of 1936 looked like our two quarters just after the election this time… As 1937 opened, just as 2013 opened, prospects were rosy that the worst was behind us. Unemployment had dropped from 25% to 14% with manufacturing output rising to its 1929 levels, and then, …. with budget cutbacks to reign in spending, very similar to sequestration today, unemployment shot back up to 19%…. If the same trend holds, our unemployment should rise to 9% again before it stabilizes and then fall slowly, ever so slowly, back to 7% it is today, quite possibly as late as 2016.
Manufacturing then cut back 37% returning work output to 1934 levels.
Finally on April 2, 1938 Roosevelt sent a new large-scale spending program to Congress, and received $3.75 billion which was split among PWA, WPA, and various relief agencies. Other appropriations raised the total to $5 billion in the spring of 1938, after which the economy recovered.
Unemployment never recovered its 1936 level until the US went into WWII….
The Stock Market which had climbed back to its 1929 high as of February of 1937, lost 50% of its value by February 1938…..
Put bluntly, with sequestration, there is zero chance stocks will rise, and a 99% chance they will fall. Doesn’t it make sense to sell out now, and put that money into the safe keeping of Treasury Bonds?
The Republicans seem jubilent they are causing it this collapse. I guess afterwards there will be no question in any reporters or any American’s mind, that Democrats and Keynes were always right, and Republicans and Milton Friedman were always dead wrong.
If you don’t do what I said, and get out now, don’t come crying to me… You were warned!
Courtesy of the Treasury Blog.
That is probably the biggest take-away historians will keep when they use today’s fiscal crises in future civic’s lessons across this country, precisely in order to teach students just how well put together this nation’s govermnent is…..
I have long blamed the filibustering Senate for intransigence. Whenever we have an emergency, the House passes legislation quickly, and the Senate takes it’s time. Things just s l o w down in the Senate.
I have also blamed that in part upon the old age of Senators, and the cliques that evolve from spending 20 to 30 years together… Senators are more worried about upsetting the feelings of Joe So-and-So instead of quickly passing the House’s legislation. Legislation also gets tabled as a favor to Ms. La-La-La, for a favor she extended 15 odd years ago…
But it is precisely these negatives that allowed the Senate to take up the fiscal cliff legislation that was all-but-dead on arrival in the House….
John Boehner, was forced to give up his lead and capitulate, when his caucus voted down giving even billionaires a tax increase. His caucus had too many Tea Partiers, who were still green behind their ears, and put their own personal principals, … over top the rest of the financial world’s welfare, including the USA….
John couldn’t control his caucus. Why was that? Because the founding fathers wanted the House to be reelected every 2 years. The idea was that these people who were invested with the responsibility of spending the “people’s” money, needed to be directly responsible to those back home, who’s money they were spending! As a result, the Tea Party contingent, whose home-spun philosophy plays well on country porches, has no idea of how things work. We don’t let two year olds drive cars for a reason.
But,…. who did solve the crises and bring both sides into agreement?
The top two members of the Senate, … The Vice President and Mitch McConnell, a Louisville Cardnals fan.
For both, a deal was necessary and they crafted one that would sell. It definitely sold the Senate… 89 to 8…. It sold the problem House of Boehner as well: 257-167 including….. with more Democrats voting for it… 172 than Republicans voted against it… 167.
85 House Republicans voted in support of this McConnell-Biden adaptation, keeping us from going over the cliff before the markets opened up in Asia…. (which at time of print are all up between .6% and 2.2%)..
Through a personal relationship based on a long history of dealing with each other in a non adversarial fashion, a deal was struck. We were clued in two weeks ago that the $400,000 level would be the floor. No surprise there.
But, now it is clear that Social Security will no longer be on the chopping block in two months. Medicare will no longer be on the chopping block in two months. Unemployment compensation (for those dismissed by their corporate employers for working too many hours under Obamacare), now will still dribble some cash to get by. The Earned Income Credit, the best part of the year for anyone earning less than $30,000, is no longer on the chopping block!
For this, the increases in additional taxes on income, estates, and investments, were softened a bit. Even though there will now be less movement of cash from the private sector to the Treasury than occurred under the boom years under Clinton, but… as long as the economy takes off, we can worry about that later.
For that, is why this bill was passed. Signs are encouraging that the economy is getting better, now that the world KNOWS no Republican (whether he really wanted to be president or not) will run the country.
To nix that up, and again, hurt those who were most hurt before, is unconscionable.
For most Americans, working and living and dying in our towns, this is what is important. It never could have happened under the dynamics of the House of Representatives. Only in the Senate, could such an agreement even be possible….
Only there buried within the term of 6 years, is enough distance available to exercise good judgment on what is necessarily right for this country, then have time to deal and fix the political repercussions back home… Only there is an opponent also a dear friend, one you take seriously and trust, causing you to give up a little more on both sides.
Only there. Once again, we see the great wisdom possessed in those we call The Founding Fathers…. Who could have known?
Here is the editorial from the Guardian, a UK paper… The Republicans try to shunt its criticism by saying it is bias. Actually, it is just the truth they don’t want to hear….
Before you go further, ask yourself, …. how many times have you heard on American television or in American editorials, that it is “BOTH” parties’ fault? Too many to remember?
Here is what the Guardian says….
There you have it: straight from the horse’s mouth… As those of us on this side of the pond who don’t have editors changing the truth in what we write, we say… Hear! Hear!
The number is staggering. $15 million to Newt Gingrich, $70 million to official Republican entities, and reportedly $65 million to dark shady political shell organizations. All, being thrown up against the current President, the man who won.
Rumors floated up that this was in support of Netanyahu and the side of Israel that invests in settlements. It appears that Romney’s fervant support of Netanyahu was the result of his ties with this man… Not long after their first $10 million meeting, Romney restated his support for one of Adelson’s top priorities — his fervent backing of Israel’s conservative government and his opposition to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Romney’s first foreign trip after his meeting with Adelson included a late July visit to Israel, which included a Jerusalem fundraiser that Adelson famously attended.
However other fundraisers are now saying differently…
Adelson is reportedly to have said he planned to spend about $100 million or “as much as it takes” to defeat Obama and help Republicans in Congressional races. Adelson’s personal wealth has been pegged at $20.5 billion by Forbes, making him one of the world’s richest men and enabling him to open his checkbook wide without worrying much about his bottom line…..
During the election, Adelson told Politico that the Justice Department investigation, and the way he felt treated by prosecutors, was a primary motivation for his investment in Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates…
In dark money he shelled out:
40 million to Karl Rove’s Crossroads.
15 million to a grassroots foundation run by the Koch Brothers.
5 million to the US Chamber of Commerce.
6.5 million to the Republican Jewish Coalition. (close to 100% of its entire funding.
It was a disappointing election for Adelson. His nemasis whooped him bad.
In SuperPac money Adelson gave $5 million to Boehner, and $5 million to Cantor and his allies. Which is why, he was in Washington today, meeting with Congressional Republicans to devise methods to disrupt any new tax on his estate… The Sands.
The primary reason for the meeting, is he wants these charges dropped. The Justice Department investigation, and the way he felt treated by prosecutors, was a primary motivation for his investment into the campaign of the Republican presidential nominee. Federal officials are looking into potential money laundering by two shady high rollers at his Las Vegas casinos.
The money laundering investigation, led by the U.S. attorney for Los Angeles, is probing whether the casino broke the law by failing to report to the government millions of dollars of potentially laundered funds that two gamblers transferred to its casinos. (Tax evasion: the same thing that brought down Al Capone.)
One of the two gamblers, Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, is being probed about over $100 million of his transactions through the casinos. Separately, he was arrested in 2009 and pleaded guilty to accepting illegal kickbacks in his job as an executive with Fry’s Electronics in California. He is now serving a six-year jail term.
The other big gambler in the probe is Zhenil Ye Gon, a Chinese-born Mexican-based businessman, who reportedly transferred $85 million to Sands casinos several years ago. Ye Gon was indicted in 2007 for dealing in illegal drugs, but the charges were dismissed in 2009.
So the largess of Sheldon Adelson’s giving experienced the Republican party, was part of the $185 million in laundered money it got from these two people, leaving a cool $35 million in profit. Seen this way, it didn’t cost Sheldon a thing.
Another inquiry by Justice and the SEC has been under way for about two years. It involves allegations that Adelson’s lucrative casinos on the Chinese island of Macau may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by paying bribes to Chinese officials to expand its operations there.
Bribing the Chinese was a smart deal, if only the SEC and Justice Department hadn’t been so “hung up” on
regulations… (Can anyone else here a Romney campaign line here?) $700,000 went to a local attorney, Leonel Alves, who was hired by the Sands Chinese subsidiary while he was a government legislator in Macau. The lion’s share of Sands’ corporate revenues now come from Macau. That $700,000 bribe now yields a return of $326 million this past quarter…. As a business proposition, it made very good sense. Unfortunately there is one of those ridiculous regulations that hog-tie real business people called Foreign Corrupt Practices Act
Republicans would simply look the other way as long as they were on the receiving end of millions. Obama’s Justice Department? Well, not so fast.
Hence the determination to throw money away on the flimsiest chance that doing so could defeat him.
Of the billion dollars spent in this past election, 15% of that came from one man. Now, I believe in America, a man should spend his money how he wishers. Had he chosen to give this to fight Breast Cancer, we would all hold him in high esteem…
And the law is so broad, after Citizen’s United, that it appears he violated no rules, no regulations, and all his giving to Republicans was legal and completely within the law….
Seen from hindsight, obviously his influence impacts candidates. Karl Rove was in his box during his election night meltdown. Some fundraisers are pointing fingers at Karl Rove for advising Sheldon not to invest in “their” dark money organization, simply leaving competing interests for Rove, out in the cold. Newt Gingrich out of nowhere came out with an uncharacteristically backing of Israel during the primary. We now know why. Netanyahu figured prominently in the third debate, far more than his importance warrants. We now know why. Republicans against their parties own self interest, are risking losing any loyality with the American middle class over their intransigence not to raise taxes a teeny bit upon the wealthy. We now know why….
Simply put, if you can’t get elected without the help of one man…. and that one man is in your office telling you what you should be doing, you are going to listen to him…
The losers of this method of campaign financing are the American people. In this battle between the wealthy and everyone else, the Republicans are siding with the wealthy for their own self interest…. and their political survival is a pretty darn big self interest. Which means the rest of us are only getting one option to choose from. One party rule will again dominate America, as long as dark money is allowed into politics and there are no caps on one person’s influence.. And that party… will be the one representing the 98%….. and any party, without being repeatedly challenged, inevitably becomes soft and corrupt.
Until soft money becomes dried up, we will continue to have Sheldon Adelson types dropping into Washington with open checkbooks, and the rest of us will suffer these childish posturing battles between Sheldon Adelson supporters, and the rest of America. More grandstanding is guaranteed to be forthcoming by the Republicans….
I’ll bet you $150 million on it….
If you listened to Rick roll over the increase taxes argument on yesterday’s show on WDEL, you heard his exasperation. Why are we raising marginal rates instead of closing loopholes?
We can do both but here is the argument why changing the top marginal rates must be done. If you want to soak the rich, i don’t think they will mind if you can also cap their deductions at 17,000. But if you keep the marginal rates low, then we have the same squalid economy we’ve had since 2000…
But this isn’t about soaking the rich. THIS IS ABOUT GROWING THE ECONOMY.
First one must realize, there is a very good reason why 47% of the people pay no taxes….. They make too little money…
So who is left to tax? The 53% who do have money.
That sounds so simple: I can’t understand why Rick Jensen can’t grasp that concept….
Here is why marginal rates are important, instead of deductions. If I have a cap on $17,000 of deductions, then I pay everything over that amount that my deductions were in the previous year. If I had $100,000 in deductions, I would get hit with $83,000 in additional taxes…. If this rate applied to $100,000 of income, ie. because before I was paying no taxes because I had 100% deductions, I seriously would be making only $17,000.. All the rest of my money would go to taxes… If this rate applied to $500,000, then with the deduction piece I would lose $83,000, but, I would be keeping $417,000. If this rate applied to $1 million, I would still lose the same $83,000 but I would still be keeping $917,000…. IF this rate applied to 100 million, i would still lose the same $83,000 but I would still be keeping $99,917,000…. if this rate applied to a billion, I would still lose the same $83,000 but I would still be keeping $999,917,000…. and we’ll stop at $100 billion: $99,999,917,000 still in MY pocket….
Now since that was so long, let me must show the marginal rate change on that top number only….
How does a 5% increase sound? Like from 35% up to 40%? We know the economy can prosper under that tax level, because that is the level that fueled the longest period of continuous growth ever in our nation…..
(Remember we got $83,000 from decreasing deductions). 5% of $100 billion is……(drumroll and rimshot)….. $5 billion… Instead of $83,000, we got $5 billion…..
That is why John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Grover Norquist and Rick Jensen are banging their heads against the wall to hold the line on marginal tax rates….
Just for the record, if that money $5 billion were applied solely to reduce the deficit? That amount of interest alone which would not then appear on our balance sheet the next year, would be….$250 million dollars….
So cutting deductions gains us $83,000. Raising the top marginal rate a teensey, teensey bit…. gains us $5 billion, and the future savings of $250,000,000 in interest savings every single year thereafter, …. as far as the eye can see…….
Please, call up Rick (302=478-9335) between the hours of 1:10 and 3:50 this afternoon, and tell him to read this article… He is such a valuable state resource, it would be a shame for him to lose credibility among his audience, when help is only a mouse click away…..
In business it is one of the traits we try to teach.. It is not a natural tendency. The natural tendency is to point the finger elsewhere, as is well known by anyone who has raised little children. Sometimes their excuses are hilarious. And sometimes those of adults are even funnier.
But in business we teach those coming up that accepting the blame does many things. It stops the investigation process. Life gets back to doing everyones job to the best of their ability.
Secondly, the person most responsible, is now in charge of finding how and why the mistake happened. Most of what we experience takes place between our two ears. For someone else to guess at what is going on there, makes a hearing sound like the comments running mad of an inane post on some blog somewhere… Everyone is an expert on what the head hancho was thinking. Better to let the person who actually knows what thought processes went down, determine the weakness and broken links, then offering it up to pure speculation…..
Third, as soon as the acceptance of accountability is made, the story, if a negative, starts to go away…. The usual formula is that on the break of the next day, the scandal is half as bad, and the next day after that, it is again half as bad or one fourth as bad as originally, and that ratio continues until soon, no one really cares.
One would think a business man at the head of the Republican Party would know this. (But then, he was only an investor; not a business man.) This moral characteristic compared to that of our current commander in chief, echos the thoughts of most Americans, …. we chose the right man to be in charge.
But here, is why, Mitt Romney says, he lost the election.
It was Governor Christie’s fault after Hurricane Sandy.
It was the GOP Primary Debate Moderators.
It was the 47% who get things for free and don’t want to do an honest days work.
It was Hurricane Sandy’s fault.
As long as it wasn’t Romney’s fault.
Forget: unemployment dropped to 7.8 the weekend after the debate.
Forget: Detroit should go bankrupt.
Forget: They are closing down all Jeep plants in the USA and making them in China.
Forget: My Vice President can’t tell the truth. Even about a marathon he ran 20 years ago.
Forget: My convention was built on a twisted lie concocted by misrepresenting the words of the President.
Forget: My bright shining moment of royal entitlement, was usurped by an empty chair.
As long as it wasn’t Romney’s fault.
Bottom line, America sensed that, or more properly put, a majority of American’s sensed that. And that is why, a commander in chief, who says, “I’m responsible for Benghazi, the buck stops here,” is always preferable to having someone who has no regard for the collateral damage his bomb throwing may cause, … because…. it is always someone else’s fault……
Courtesy of Washington Post
More than three percent of the electorate told exit pollers they were more liberal in 2012 than they were in 2008.
Currently liberals are at their highest ranking since Roosevelt in 1936. Whereas Conservatives showed little gain, Liberals climbed at the fastest rate on the chart.
Things to ponder.
Having a president called a liberal who is doing a marvelous job, cuts down on the pejorativeness of the word Liberal. Speculation is: people are no longer afraid to say they are, because Obama’s performance backs them up.
Second, having conservatives constantly embarrass themselves and the nation, every 24 hours making us look pathetically bad, would make one squeamish to tell a stranger, that they were conservative. I mean, people have pride.
Also, conservatives are dying every day, and liberals are being born. Without winning converts, that trend would continue.
But interestingly, over the past four years, people have decided they don’t mind being called a liberal… it also shows conservatives, that no matter how they process their message, even if they make the South Carolina beauty queen their official spokesperson, they lose. Conservatism is dead, unless it continues in a capacity that moderates will say, “oh, you said you’d keep out of women’s lives? keep taxes high on the wealthy? sure we’ll get back on board”. i can’t see Republicans going that far, meaning that Democrats and moderates will rule, “as far as the eye can see”….”
