The Morning Joe Rebuttal for March 3rd, 2010
Observations:
1) Panderer in waiting Mitt Romney comes out of his ice cave and shares his memoirs and evolution, and it’s an ammunition dump. I’m sorry this is not going to go well, so in the interest of not leaving a permanent scar, I'll just go issue by issue.
“We are empowering terrorist with our current president’s rhetoric abroad”. Rather than responding, just imagine the alternative, which was the Bush adventurism of two mismanaged unfunded wars, and scorched earth economic globalization to make the transfer of wealth principle we are hurting ourselves with domestically, a global policy.
“Stop spending on the China credit card”. Now would that be before or after you allowed the middle class to enter 25% real unemployment by refusing to use deficits to defeat economic catastrophe? And where in your parties history has this discipline been evident?
“Hold China’s feet to the fire about Iran, with economic consequences”. That’s Romney code, so you better get good at it. China will be given the keys to the premium empowering relationship with the Revolutionary Guard regime, and buy Wal Mart stock, because cheap slave labor products will flood our consumer goods market as a reward.
“Health care should never be free for those with the ability to pay”. You will never get Romney to side with you in your health care in this lifetime. The Massachusetts plan is an unfunded nightmare. Basically, healthcare is a micro tax and another layer to the tax system that feeds more off of the middle class than anywhere else.
Honestly, I did not mind the part of Romney’s speil that the consumer should be empowered at the price point level in his healthcare decisions. But for me, trust will always be an issue with Mitt, and I can’t tell the policy from the carrot in any of his platform.
2) Mort Zuckerman couldn’t talk himself into being a busboy for New York. I just can’t blame him. Who wants the gig, and maybe he just wanted to send his party a message. Although he would have run as an independent, it would have been a ‘Bloomberg’ independent, which is a protest against an undisciplined Republican party.
His message is powerful, Bloomberg is a shining symbol of what our politics should look like, e.g. with the campaign money influence removed. But that’s another issue.
The real issue is that a mayor is an executive, and the Senator is on the varsity football team. The Senate caucus, there are only two, and there was discussion of trying to wedge that issue open, seems like it would outlast any individual in a way dramatically departed from the New York mayor. Thus you move to another city and disrupt your life just to find out that 1 in 100 is nowhere near executive power or effect.
It would be easier for a guy like Mort to effect change in the Senate by fixing the campaign money problem, or reducing the level of bought media distortion by his personal array of levers.
3) Why didn’t Morning Joe ask Richard Haas about Dan Senor? One of my favorite things is getting Richard Haas to riff on domestic issues. He is a human laser, and lines like “breeds populism or worse” cement that view.
Richard seemed to want to point the conversation towards the accurate reflection that the fiscal nightmare of New York and California is the next show to drop. Someone said yesterday that California is the next Greece. That’s cheap commentary, but still indicative that the stimulus effect on the states went unnoticed thus isn’t politically repeatable, when the shortfall next time around will be exponentially higher. Look all around you, and all the signs are that of the double dip, but make no mistake, the states will lead the way down.
Now mix that with Romney’s ‘this stuff should be handled at the state level’ mantra from #1 above. Wait, that doesn’t reconcile. Ever since Clinton’s 100,000 police unfunded national mandate, we have heaped governing, actual governing, on the states, while the federal government spends its time transferring wealth. Go Rick Perry, go Ron Paul, step into the obvious void, but realize it is not a solution. The states cannot do any better than the federal government at provision of services.
In fact, the schools, police, and health care should be re pyramid-ed to be the federal governments responsibility before they spend a penny on contract payments elsewhere. Think about it, and this isn’t limited to the federal government. You see Bunning axe-ing highway workers at the same time you see Arne Duncan saying let’s hire new motivated teachers, yet the opposite of Duncan’s premise is occurring. The younger teachers are paycheck to paycheck and expect to get fired first. In that environment, they lose all of the service career motivation and start their day with Monster.com looking to move into sales, probably in sub prime mortgage, or WeBuyGold.com pawnshops.
This phenomenon is because in the pecking order of expenditures, the people we need the most are the least protected, because all of the transfer of wealth stuff, the privatization contracts, the subsidy to private industry deals, are contract payments that are undelayable and unmanageable and thus not on the chopping block in a fiscal crisis.
Bunning has a valid point, but I don’t see anyone looking to grab that $10 billion for the unemployment extension from clawbacks of $23,000 toilet seats buried in defense contracts. Waste, fraud, abuse and only then teachers and citizens.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label arne duncan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label arne duncan. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Up In The Air
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 2, 2010
Observations:
1) I’m flying today, and I’m flying Southwest. This airline is not immune to some of the same maintenance troubles we have seen across the US airline industry, but it does not have Colgan Air in charge of its unprofitable routes. You can look at the planes and see some are tertiary market planes and some are LA-SFO top line planes. The chief difference is that it’s the same mechanics, same pilots, same standards. My other two favorite airlines Jet Blue and Virgin America don’t have contract service for route completion either.
Continuing on his hitting streak, Mike Barnicle has paragraphed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s raw anger, considering their own airborne near miss. Barnicle caught the whole subject by identifying the major airlines as cutting corners across their business from safety to pensions as the ultimate culprit. This example is another in a series of open wounds in the disintegrating old world American airline industry. Unrelated to the Buffalo crash, but somehow part of the equation are those other statistics, like when Las Vegas turns down United for growth into the Nevada market because it doesn’t want to risk the burden of United using bankruptcy again to void pensions, leaving its retired mechanics as wards of the state.
I have friends who have had severe life disruptions because out of school they chose Delta and Continental as their career paths. Both are no longer in the industry. The person I’m closest with endured humiliation after humiliation for nearly 10 years prior to finally restructuring his vocational plan. And just to be very clear, 9/11 occurred near the end of that 10 years, not early as a chief causal factor. Now take that scenario one further step to those airlines wanting out of the small commuter routes and moving toward a version of outsourcing that enabled them, or so they thought, a degree of plausible deniability to some of the most reckless cutting they desired to move their bottom line and executive bonuses forward.
2) Education Secretary Arne Duncan might as well have said ‘unions have consequences’ in his non answer today to why the teachers union was obstructing his ‘race to the top’ program for New York. Look closely and you’ll see that look that you normally see in job interviews from trained hr execs that are making you do all the talking, while they note results. Duncan will wait for the teachers union to make a conciliatory plan, or they will be the cause of a significant loss of opportunity for New York’s children and watch the bottom fall out.
That is management, empower the parts of the organization to strive to get better, or cut themselves. It serves in stark contrast to the style of management we talked about with the airlines above where cutting your way to victory still has supportive boards of directors.
Next step for this discussion has to be ‘no state left behind’. The quickest way to make a state seem like Chainsaw Al Dunlop is to leave it facing disastrous choices on multiple fronts from health, to transportation to education.
The states are no better than the airlines in that they were very bold in their attempts to get handouts in 2009. Unfortunately in state after state, key funding for the three big things above has been migrated to other parts of the budget. If you were going to fund a state initiative anywhere from the federal level, the last thing you would do is leave that state any wiggle room, they will let you down like a central park junkie at this point.
Arne Duncan is making this point in the New York issue via lack of comment on Morning Joe today. That void says this: the teachers union will not take Duncan’s program and reduce it to status quo through double speak like “let’s make this competitive fund available to all teachers”.
And these are teachers.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I’m flying today, and I’m flying Southwest. This airline is not immune to some of the same maintenance troubles we have seen across the US airline industry, but it does not have Colgan Air in charge of its unprofitable routes. You can look at the planes and see some are tertiary market planes and some are LA-SFO top line planes. The chief difference is that it’s the same mechanics, same pilots, same standards. My other two favorite airlines Jet Blue and Virgin America don’t have contract service for route completion either.
Continuing on his hitting streak, Mike Barnicle has paragraphed Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s raw anger, considering their own airborne near miss. Barnicle caught the whole subject by identifying the major airlines as cutting corners across their business from safety to pensions as the ultimate culprit. This example is another in a series of open wounds in the disintegrating old world American airline industry. Unrelated to the Buffalo crash, but somehow part of the equation are those other statistics, like when Las Vegas turns down United for growth into the Nevada market because it doesn’t want to risk the burden of United using bankruptcy again to void pensions, leaving its retired mechanics as wards of the state.
I have friends who have had severe life disruptions because out of school they chose Delta and Continental as their career paths. Both are no longer in the industry. The person I’m closest with endured humiliation after humiliation for nearly 10 years prior to finally restructuring his vocational plan. And just to be very clear, 9/11 occurred near the end of that 10 years, not early as a chief causal factor. Now take that scenario one further step to those airlines wanting out of the small commuter routes and moving toward a version of outsourcing that enabled them, or so they thought, a degree of plausible deniability to some of the most reckless cutting they desired to move their bottom line and executive bonuses forward.
2) Education Secretary Arne Duncan might as well have said ‘unions have consequences’ in his non answer today to why the teachers union was obstructing his ‘race to the top’ program for New York. Look closely and you’ll see that look that you normally see in job interviews from trained hr execs that are making you do all the talking, while they note results. Duncan will wait for the teachers union to make a conciliatory plan, or they will be the cause of a significant loss of opportunity for New York’s children and watch the bottom fall out.
That is management, empower the parts of the organization to strive to get better, or cut themselves. It serves in stark contrast to the style of management we talked about with the airlines above where cutting your way to victory still has supportive boards of directors.
Next step for this discussion has to be ‘no state left behind’. The quickest way to make a state seem like Chainsaw Al Dunlop is to leave it facing disastrous choices on multiple fronts from health, to transportation to education.
The states are no better than the airlines in that they were very bold in their attempts to get handouts in 2009. Unfortunately in state after state, key funding for the three big things above has been migrated to other parts of the budget. If you were going to fund a state initiative anywhere from the federal level, the last thing you would do is leave that state any wiggle room, they will let you down like a central park junkie at this point.
Arne Duncan is making this point in the New York issue via lack of comment on Morning Joe today. That void says this: the teachers union will not take Duncan’s program and reduce it to status quo through double speak like “let’s make this competitive fund available to all teachers”.
And these are teachers.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
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