The Morning Joe Rebuttal for September 13th, 2010
Observations:
1) Joe Biden had it figured out before all of us. What was amazing about the seemingly enlightened conversation that took place between Joe Conason, David Ignatius, and Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough was what was missing. Seeming like a retroactive genius, Joe Biden had this Afghanistan debacle figured out light years before anyone else. Whether he was blasting Karzai to his face, or making the Pakistan math plain, or showing us the right solution, Joe Biden has been out in front for a long time. A lot longer then myself, a lot longer than the panel today.
We need to go back to a 15,000 person expeditionary force under CIA control. Maybe even less. And we need to control the airspace, freely using the predator system to make no corner of the vast, uninviting terrain of Afghanistan safe for enemies of the United States. That skeleton force should be agnostic to the government of Afghanistan and should rightly be as empowering to the opposition as it is to the ruling party.
The implication that the surge is having an opposite effect actually makes a lot of what Morning Joe has been wishing for suddenly realistic. If we can go from $100 billion in meaningless to $500 million in no one is safe if we’re not safe targeting, that’s a lot of fiscal change for our country.
I do understand that the last of the surge troops just got there in the last few weeks. That doesn’t make me happy, and should bring up continued charges of slow walking by the Pentagon. I am no longer sure if that slow walking was residual effect from the McChrystal regime or if it is a lingering issue, but either way the strategy by those doing it is fatally flawed. The flaw is that there was little calculus in a slow walking strategy for the deteriorating domestic fiscal situation.
A second possible scenario that would disturb anyone may have been that the slowing of the implementation was a process of obstruction by the Pentagon similar to what legislative Republicans do every day: we just won’t do our jobs until a friendly governing regime takes over in Washington. No one knows whether that is part of the calculus, but if Wall Street and Mitch McConnell are doing it, if United Technologies is openly endorsing regime change in the United States, what would generals in the US armed forces do if they want post retirement high paying work?
Nonetheless, now the December evaluation can’t come soon enough, and look for the Biden plan to get several million more eyeballs now that throwing $150 billion more dollars into the ocean didn’t work.
2) Who is retarded now? How can you not be motivated by the Frank Rich article over the weekend? When Rahm Emmanuel slighted the base of the Democratic Party over their incessant calls for real reform instead of lip service, all of us got a reality check. Did we really have a naiveté of a level that made wanting to fix our crumbling governing services on a real level an exercise in Shangri-la?
Reminded by Rich of the FDR vitriol spewed at the robber barons who used fallacy optics to try and populize their self serving enrichment, reminded of the Obama claims made on the way into the oval office that it was real change not something titled change that is being heralded as change but can’t pass any reasonable muster as change, you have to feel at least a little better that you weren’t just dreaming irrationally for the last 22 months.
Rahm is jumping ship. We are left with his awful compromises, and in need of someone who has his moxie, but aims that moxie at adversaries instead of eating his own young with it.
What happens next is clearly indicative of whether we were duped at the outset, or if this is the most cardiac arresting new scale yet of the Obama ‘real good in the fourth quarter” phenomenon. Is it a setup where all the Goldman guys got the finance gigs, Rahm the chief of staff gig, Gates stayed on as defense chief to keep the wolves circling? Will the Goolsbee appointment, a Warren nod, a new Defense Secretary, and a street fighter with the people on his prevailing agenda as the new chief of staff be Obama setting the tempo for a 6 year run of cementing the loose cornerstones into a formidable new style of US governance? Or is it next stop, Manchuria?
3) Can I get an economist, please? I’ll remind you of one other nugget from my month long pro Paul Krugman rant: part of Keynesian doctrine insists that the private sector be harnessed in times of crisis and made to work towards a common goal of full employment. That is not from any Krugman rant, surprisingly, but is a most valid connection to this weekend’s Frank Rich column. You have to not let the Wall Street guys hold you hostage, it has to be the other way around. Listen to the Joe Scarborough harping on capital gains taxes today and you will see my point. Joe Scarborough desperately needs to have an economist on set at all times right now because he rarely makes more than base algebraic sense when he talks about the subject. But when you raise the capital gains tax without going the extra step of steepening the raise for gains made at the expense of the domestic tax base, and lessening or removing the tax for gains made that evolve the domestic tax base you leave a resonating point on the table. When you make numbers move without a substantive reasoning you give hipshot anecdotes like what came from Scarborough today a whole new round or repetition, and repetition outlasts, and can ultimately undermine, more logical paths when mixed with political rhetoric.
You, Mr. Obama, also have to not let the guys running around without a logical leg to stand on maintain the high ground simply by attrition of your will. I’ll gladly continue to take a pickaxe to Scarborough’s fallacy economics every time it comes up. He has yet to be right with that argument about the top-level tax expiration. The only reason he is almost right about the capital gains thing is that the administration lacked the conviction to use targeting of the capital gains tax to grow the economy, a reason Scarborough didn’t cite or base his argument on, he just got lucky.
Mr. Scarborough, you got the high ground via attrition, don’t get used to it.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Warren. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Warren. Show all posts
Monday, September 13, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Vote For The Skunk
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for August 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) I want to talk to the 55 congressional districts bent on pitching their Democratic congressperson for a Republican one. I want to go to work for the DCCC tomorrow and make 55 micro campaigns happen. It would look like this:
A skunk emits a stink that envelopes an entire Country or District, that skunk then says vote for me because it stinks in here, and that skunk is John Boehner and his proxy in your town.
We should have done more to correct economic conditions, but why didn’t we? Could it have anything to do with a campaign of obstruction on the other side? Does the average American voter maintain the irrationality needed to vote for the architects of stagnation in Government?
We should have really reformed health care instead of falsely naming the prevailing capitulation ‘reform’. Does that same voter believe that the capitulation occurred within the Democratic congressional caucus? The agents of dilution were in the White House, Rahm Emmanual, and the Senate, Max Baucus. You are throwing the people the least responsible for the diluted nature of the health care attempt out, and subsequently doing the bidding of the party of the company store.
We should already be looking at the Consumer Protection czar Elizabeth Warren. The fact that we aren’t is likely in the hands of lame duck Senator Chris Dodd, and White House jelly David Axelrod. Do you really want to pitch out your Congressman for someone who will come down on the wrong side of ‘Banks versus People’?
There is virtually no issue where the Republican party has the high ground. They have made a perilous place for us to live in, and are telling you that unless you put them back in office the economy, run by their chief campaign benefactors, will continue to hoard the money from the bailout within our nations corporate coffers and will refuse to do their part to path the nation towards recovery.
That isn’t a campaign slogan, that is a threat, and no fear mongering is base enough for any member of the Republican Party to utilize to regain political control. Once in control, the Republican economic recovery will be designed for those at the top of the food chain and the former middle class will await the descent of crumbs in subsequent time periods.
As you can probably tell, I am infuriated at the glib insinuation that it’s over for the Democratic congress. Mr. Van Hollen feel free to shoot me an email anytime at MorningJoeRebuttal@Gmail.com and I”ll go spend the next 90 days putting the above message into your 55 most perilous districts in a way that I’m not sure traditional campaign tactics are capable of.
Like I said a couple of months ago to Harry Reid’s campaign, if you think the under 35 crowd is ready to let the guy who got health care through the Senate get ousted as a reward for his work, you are mistaken. The same is true here. If you think that the under 35 crowd wants to see the legislative body that most closely resembles the truth in progress regress to rubberstamp land, you have misjudged. They want jobs, but the days of being held hostage by pro-corporate trickle down theory for those jobs are ancient history, and that is all your opponents have.
As a footnote, Chris Christie is coveted property in Republican circles for his determination to be fiscally responsible and not to tax in a time of economic crisis. Anyone who mixes up his state level governing with what happens in Washington is being duped. Executive control of a state is a much different thing, even though it’s not currently obvious to us in California. I also would wait a little bit before getting too glowing on Gov. Christie, and look at the results a couple years in: did he fire teachers or kill sweetheart corporate contracts first? There are $578 million dollar schools across this corrupt land, and they have to be a deficit mending priority.
2) Morning Joe had Jim Cramer on yesterday, and he made small talk over all kinds of mosque related time wasters and baseball and whatever else trotted across a discombobulated set. Then, when it was time for his show he made a special comment on markets that called out everyone but especially the President in a very bearish statement.
Why have a show like Morning Joe if you have these guest on that will make news and have important takes a few hours later, but you have them bogged down in distraction land. This isn’t an indictment of Mika Brzezinski, who did an admirable job of hard line interrogation of anyone she thought was making political opportunism their selfish priority, but more a Chris Licht question. Why do you think it’s a good idea to have your show look like a 10 million dollar jungle gym by missing this stuff? Why not be out in front that if Cramer has a boilup on his mind, if he is genuinely impassioned about something, it must be part of your show?
I don’t agree with a lot of Cramer’s take in his diatribe, the Geithner adulation, the take that Obama’s limitations are the significant part of the malaise in the stock market, that these items are priority reasons why companies aren’t hiring. In fact, in keeping with #1 above, I think it’s actually part of the problem that 30 years into to trickle down economics we have stumbled on the dirty little downside of that school of thought: we have to ask big business to stop holding the country’s middle class hostage, and they get to lobby for a further position of control of the levers of the country that affect them as a result. That is nothing if not showing the opposite nature of civic and corporate intent.
Business is meant to be harnessed, there is a way to do it, but it is evaporating one Citizen’s United at a time. That debate could have been had on the Morning Joe show with the Cramer, but instead, hilarity ensued.
3) Pat Buchanan almost got it out and on the discussion table, but the similarity between the Florida senate election and the eventuality that Mike Bloomberg will be our next president is uncanny. A populist (Bloomberg or Christ) supplants the extremist (Rubio or Palin) as the conservative yet centrist choice in order to have a level head in the game versus the Democrat. Hopefully this premonition is in designs for 2016, driven by the fact that the Florida Democrat is weak as the example and no one is heir apparent to Obama. As an investor, Bloomberg knows running against Obama in 2012 is a risky.
We are forced to accept the trend that there hasn’t been an election with two qualified candidates for President in recent memory. Often, neither are qualified. The job is so hard that when we see people who might be able to do the job, we saw that in Obama and it may yet pan out, we as a nation coalesce around a path to get them in the chair. Bush 43, Gore, Kerry, McCain, Mondale, Dukakis, Romney, Palin or Pawlenty: None of them should have ever been or ever be near that chair.
Bloomberg will likely get a chance to survey the field and walk into the White House unopposed in 2016. He will be seen like the microcosm similarity of Governor Christ in Florida as the sane choice, party regardless. Hillary Clinton stands an outside chance of changing this, but we will know more when and if the Biden-Clinton swap occurs in 2012.
If Bloomberg chooses 2012, it’s not so clear.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Wants Cake, Also Wants To Eat
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for July 13th, 2010
Observations:
1) Just an astounding conversation with Joe Scarborough and Andrew Ross Sorkin today where JS felt compelled to ask for 100% assurance of immediate containment of any spill prior to there being more drilling. Now far be it from me to feel like Scarborough needs a reality check, but in this case this was an absolutely egregious and selective personal optimization choice. Let’s list our components:
· Drove V8 forever
· All of his Florida and DC neighbors drove V8 forever
· Suddenly a “surprise” attack of an oil spill creates mea culpa
· Wants oil, but only with assurance
· Wants green overhaul of economy if no assurance is available
Now, this has all the hypocritical connotation of ‘clean coal’ or ‘natural gas’. We know the truth, that we are dependent on oil and have the world’s biggest consumer economy for it and are thus responsible not just for the consumption of, but logistics of transporting the 25% of the global oil supply.
In our haste to grow GDP quarter over quarter, we promote the recklessness that is BP’s environmental record in order to not have the supply of oil be any inhibition to our free enterprise system. The national economic security implications of the oil supply assure that the most profitable American companies are oil companies. It is known.
So with oil fueling the nation and its economy along with it, the pressure to grow the economy means eventually an anomaly will occur in that supply and we will have either a price catastrophe, security catastrophe, financial catastrophe or environmental catastrophe, wait, we’ve had all of these happen already.
And Mr. Scarborough loudly beckons for certainty? Quaint.
2) I understand that we on the left have empowered minor leaguers to run the country and are now facing a hefty mid term election task to keep these guys in place until they get the speed of the game. I understand that their inability to master their skill at national governance is being exploited by the right and the old guard left and that status quo continues to rule the day one maneuver at a time.
But are you really ready to send any part of this government back to the Iraq invading, Patriot en-Act-ing, Medicare “D” initiating, Cheney Energy Commission-ing, torture-ing, fear-baiting, mandate intolerance by law cronies that we all so desperately conspired to usher out over the last 40 months? You would give these guys the keys so that you could better afford Chinese socks from Wal-mart?
As you can see by some of my previous rants, I’m hard up to find who to trust. I trust myself, Elizabeth Warren, Nassim Taleb, Matt Taibbi, and get this: Joe Scarborough. I trust that Obama and Axelrod mean well but are currently outclassed and out framed in their governance. I don’t know anything about Rahm Emmanuel, and that’s a problem at this point.
But the list of people I don’t trust is long and growing. I learned not to trust most of them years ago, but every day another person makes the perp walk, not to jail, but to the microphone to lay out a doublespeak demonstration why they cannot support the middle class against the ruling elite for whatever hollow reason suits them that day, and today that was Tim Kaine (yikes!).
But I can tell you one thing, if Joe Barton is a committee chairmanship next year, it’s pitchfork time, if Boehner is in charge of anything other than the detention of the Breakfast Club, it’s pitchfork time.
You need to make an appropriately proportionate decision, immediately.
3) Thad Allen was not convincing in his reaction to Willie Geist’s well timed grenade about containment ship operations. The amount of unexplainable nonsense coming from the spill site is literally JFK-assassination-level unsavory. No one will ever convince the American people that there aren’t two stories, one told (sometimes) now, and one that will come out in 40 years talking about ‘the American people would’ve never accepted the real story’.
The earnings date, the Libya thing (that everyone knew already), the missing details on the containment, the press blockade, the scope of the disaster. These are all things that continue to amalgamate into a story of a disaster where everyone panicked.
I’m happy that we are seeing the story on the Morning Joe show after a long gap. It seems like it’s only on the show now because the good news is starting to show up, and it was too hard when the news was only bad. Stuff we learned when Iraq stopped getting covered in 2005.
If you’re serious, we need to get an environmental expert on the show who is willing to talk about the toxicity of the dispersants, who is willing to talk about the real fallout, willing to show the computer predictions of 15 years of oil flows. We need someone who can explain, like you got on PBS yesterday, that all of the animals that live in oceans drop down to the line of perpetual darkness to feed: whales, turtles, dolphins, fish, and that is likely where they will find a blinding pool of oil that no one has the courage to enumerate.
Can you find that courage, or are we just here to try and put a fake wrap on this story which will be with us like a generational plague? Mika seems really involved, but honestly, she appears to be an unwitting agent of distraction by finding her focus on the smaller parts of the story to the complete absence of the 150 million barrel guerrilla in the room, and to the complete absence of the 25 billion barrel apocalypse one geological anomaly away from replacing it as our nation’s disaster.
It seems like you’re making it harder than it already is, the question is why?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Just an astounding conversation with Joe Scarborough and Andrew Ross Sorkin today where JS felt compelled to ask for 100% assurance of immediate containment of any spill prior to there being more drilling. Now far be it from me to feel like Scarborough needs a reality check, but in this case this was an absolutely egregious and selective personal optimization choice. Let’s list our components:
· Drove V8 forever
· All of his Florida and DC neighbors drove V8 forever
· Suddenly a “surprise” attack of an oil spill creates mea culpa
· Wants oil, but only with assurance
· Wants green overhaul of economy if no assurance is available
Now, this has all the hypocritical connotation of ‘clean coal’ or ‘natural gas’. We know the truth, that we are dependent on oil and have the world’s biggest consumer economy for it and are thus responsible not just for the consumption of, but logistics of transporting the 25% of the global oil supply.
In our haste to grow GDP quarter over quarter, we promote the recklessness that is BP’s environmental record in order to not have the supply of oil be any inhibition to our free enterprise system. The national economic security implications of the oil supply assure that the most profitable American companies are oil companies. It is known.
So with oil fueling the nation and its economy along with it, the pressure to grow the economy means eventually an anomaly will occur in that supply and we will have either a price catastrophe, security catastrophe, financial catastrophe or environmental catastrophe, wait, we’ve had all of these happen already.
And Mr. Scarborough loudly beckons for certainty? Quaint.
2) I understand that we on the left have empowered minor leaguers to run the country and are now facing a hefty mid term election task to keep these guys in place until they get the speed of the game. I understand that their inability to master their skill at national governance is being exploited by the right and the old guard left and that status quo continues to rule the day one maneuver at a time.
But are you really ready to send any part of this government back to the Iraq invading, Patriot en-Act-ing, Medicare “D” initiating, Cheney Energy Commission-ing, torture-ing, fear-baiting, mandate intolerance by law cronies that we all so desperately conspired to usher out over the last 40 months? You would give these guys the keys so that you could better afford Chinese socks from Wal-mart?
As you can see by some of my previous rants, I’m hard up to find who to trust. I trust myself, Elizabeth Warren, Nassim Taleb, Matt Taibbi, and get this: Joe Scarborough. I trust that Obama and Axelrod mean well but are currently outclassed and out framed in their governance. I don’t know anything about Rahm Emmanuel, and that’s a problem at this point.
But the list of people I don’t trust is long and growing. I learned not to trust most of them years ago, but every day another person makes the perp walk, not to jail, but to the microphone to lay out a doublespeak demonstration why they cannot support the middle class against the ruling elite for whatever hollow reason suits them that day, and today that was Tim Kaine (yikes!).
But I can tell you one thing, if Joe Barton is a committee chairmanship next year, it’s pitchfork time, if Boehner is in charge of anything other than the detention of the Breakfast Club, it’s pitchfork time.
You need to make an appropriately proportionate decision, immediately.
3) Thad Allen was not convincing in his reaction to Willie Geist’s well timed grenade about containment ship operations. The amount of unexplainable nonsense coming from the spill site is literally JFK-assassination-level unsavory. No one will ever convince the American people that there aren’t two stories, one told (sometimes) now, and one that will come out in 40 years talking about ‘the American people would’ve never accepted the real story’.
The earnings date, the Libya thing (that everyone knew already), the missing details on the containment, the press blockade, the scope of the disaster. These are all things that continue to amalgamate into a story of a disaster where everyone panicked.
I’m happy that we are seeing the story on the Morning Joe show after a long gap. It seems like it’s only on the show now because the good news is starting to show up, and it was too hard when the news was only bad. Stuff we learned when Iraq stopped getting covered in 2005.
If you’re serious, we need to get an environmental expert on the show who is willing to talk about the toxicity of the dispersants, who is willing to talk about the real fallout, willing to show the computer predictions of 15 years of oil flows. We need someone who can explain, like you got on PBS yesterday, that all of the animals that live in oceans drop down to the line of perpetual darkness to feed: whales, turtles, dolphins, fish, and that is likely where they will find a blinding pool of oil that no one has the courage to enumerate.
Can you find that courage, or are we just here to try and put a fake wrap on this story which will be with us like a generational plague? Mika seems really involved, but honestly, she appears to be an unwitting agent of distraction by finding her focus on the smaller parts of the story to the complete absence of the 150 million barrel guerrilla in the room, and to the complete absence of the 25 billion barrel apocalypse one geological anomaly away from replacing it as our nation’s disaster.
It seems like you’re making it harder than it already is, the question is why?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
A Lack Of Connectivity
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for June 10th, 2010
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo, gets it right, but gets it wrong. Four other people are sitting at the table telling her that a sub $100k career professional is no match to regulate a $1 million dollar executive armed with a $5 million dollar lobbyist, that its not a fair fight, and she stays on her CNBC-wide take that the little guy is the guy who is to blame for the financial meltdown and the oil spill.
Yes, MMS is entirely at fault for working as a sub-agency of the oil companies, in fact it's an industry shuffling it’s own executives in and out of the regulatory facility as regulators sort’ve like the executive on loan program at the United Way.
Yes, 400 government agencies we’re meant to combine to regulate AIG.
But is this the perpetuation of the American way that when things go wrong don’t blame the shooter, blame society?
Rick Santelli’s now famous meltdown on CNBC claiming the mortgage crisis is 100 million bad American borrowers with blood on their hands got a wonderful companion piece today when Maria insisted that crises in America are the fault of bad regulators and thus business should be free to drive the economy until such a time as those bad regulators step up to do their job.
While on it’s surface, the Elizabeth Warren segment seemed like an acknowledgment that Maria was on to something, if you think Warren isn’t looking to fix how government keeps us safe from economic predation, you and Maria should scoot yourselves right on over to GoldNow.com and SurvivalGuns.com and stock up. Goldman Sachs did, because they still think they’re going to get away with it.
There is zero equity in regulation. Repeat. There is zero equity in regulation.
2) Elizabeth Warren made a case today that what financial regulation will accomplish is to help all these disparate regulators connect the dots to monitor our financial system. Erin Burnett, made the same case s short while later, that should the details be brought to light, it would be harder for a regulator to turn his head for profit as an executive on loan from the industry he is meant to control. Ok, I added the turn the head part, but Erin did say bring the details up one level.
This overview of how financial regulation should work sounds remarkably like the reforms made to our intelligence community after the attacks of September 11th. There needed to be a critical connect the dots infrastructure added to prevent separate agencies from allowing our enemies to attack us at the blind spots where we don’t connect. Now we have to protect ourselves from our own corporations exploiting gaps in existing regulatory structure.
The funny thing is, we have just hired our 4th Director of National Intelligence in the 5 years since the intelligence reforms went into effect, and the Christmas day attack demonstrated that inter-connectivity is still a dream unrealized in the intelligence community.
Now this is a hard comparison, but you can (sometimes) rebuild the damage from an attack, and regenerate lost populations from an attack, but let us never forget that if the sky ever fell financially, like it did in the great depression, we as a world population are just not equipped to for those ramifications.
When it happened last time, the vacuum the financial crisis created led us to World War and Cold War. Interestingly enough, the world population at that time had about 300% more self sufficiency than they do now, they were able to grow and raise their food and weren’t bound by an oil based transportation grid.
We are far more susceptible to a catastrophic interruption to society currently, should our global economy become disabled significantly.
Do you feel like anyone is explaining the stakes of the game to you? Those in charge of governing are as afraid of pitchforks as the Wall Street community, and they all have a vested interest in the gravy train as it is.
3) Did anyone else noticed that the 12 people deemed most responsible for the oil spill by Time Magazine did not include Sarah Palin and “drill, baby, drill” as a national mantra. They glossed over that omission by making the American driver the number 7 culprit. Further, somehow they got Sarah Palin to participate in an issue of Time devoted to the perils of oil consumption and aggressive extraction?
Were her publicist and strategist on vacation when that happened? That is the only way that could’ve transpired as witnessed.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Maria Bartiromo, gets it right, but gets it wrong. Four other people are sitting at the table telling her that a sub $100k career professional is no match to regulate a $1 million dollar executive armed with a $5 million dollar lobbyist, that its not a fair fight, and she stays on her CNBC-wide take that the little guy is the guy who is to blame for the financial meltdown and the oil spill.
Yes, MMS is entirely at fault for working as a sub-agency of the oil companies, in fact it's an industry shuffling it’s own executives in and out of the regulatory facility as regulators sort’ve like the executive on loan program at the United Way.
Yes, 400 government agencies we’re meant to combine to regulate AIG.
But is this the perpetuation of the American way that when things go wrong don’t blame the shooter, blame society?
Rick Santelli’s now famous meltdown on CNBC claiming the mortgage crisis is 100 million bad American borrowers with blood on their hands got a wonderful companion piece today when Maria insisted that crises in America are the fault of bad regulators and thus business should be free to drive the economy until such a time as those bad regulators step up to do their job.
While on it’s surface, the Elizabeth Warren segment seemed like an acknowledgment that Maria was on to something, if you think Warren isn’t looking to fix how government keeps us safe from economic predation, you and Maria should scoot yourselves right on over to GoldNow.com and SurvivalGuns.com and stock up. Goldman Sachs did, because they still think they’re going to get away with it.
There is zero equity in regulation. Repeat. There is zero equity in regulation.
2) Elizabeth Warren made a case today that what financial regulation will accomplish is to help all these disparate regulators connect the dots to monitor our financial system. Erin Burnett, made the same case s short while later, that should the details be brought to light, it would be harder for a regulator to turn his head for profit as an executive on loan from the industry he is meant to control. Ok, I added the turn the head part, but Erin did say bring the details up one level.
This overview of how financial regulation should work sounds remarkably like the reforms made to our intelligence community after the attacks of September 11th. There needed to be a critical connect the dots infrastructure added to prevent separate agencies from allowing our enemies to attack us at the blind spots where we don’t connect. Now we have to protect ourselves from our own corporations exploiting gaps in existing regulatory structure.
The funny thing is, we have just hired our 4th Director of National Intelligence in the 5 years since the intelligence reforms went into effect, and the Christmas day attack demonstrated that inter-connectivity is still a dream unrealized in the intelligence community.
Now this is a hard comparison, but you can (sometimes) rebuild the damage from an attack, and regenerate lost populations from an attack, but let us never forget that if the sky ever fell financially, like it did in the great depression, we as a world population are just not equipped to for those ramifications.
When it happened last time, the vacuum the financial crisis created led us to World War and Cold War. Interestingly enough, the world population at that time had about 300% more self sufficiency than they do now, they were able to grow and raise their food and weren’t bound by an oil based transportation grid.
We are far more susceptible to a catastrophic interruption to society currently, should our global economy become disabled significantly.
Do you feel like anyone is explaining the stakes of the game to you? Those in charge of governing are as afraid of pitchforks as the Wall Street community, and they all have a vested interest in the gravy train as it is.
3) Did anyone else noticed that the 12 people deemed most responsible for the oil spill by Time Magazine did not include Sarah Palin and “drill, baby, drill” as a national mantra. They glossed over that omission by making the American driver the number 7 culprit. Further, somehow they got Sarah Palin to participate in an issue of Time devoted to the perils of oil consumption and aggressive extraction?
Were her publicist and strategist on vacation when that happened? That is the only way that could’ve transpired as witnessed.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Dogs And Cats Living Together
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 25th, 2010
Observations:
1) How can you watch Elizabeth Warren and not go out and start hoarding gold Krugerrands? I mean that’s a bleak outlook, the small signs are there that a big second financial struggle is upon us. The Norah O’Donnell question is the crux of it all, how has the financial industry been allowed to create a second precipice unchecked, and it’s an important point. That should be Mika asking that question. Currently the show needs to import someone to ask the connect the dots question. We have done nothing to prevent the next collapse and the second bubble is forming.
Buchanan brings up the Chinese divestment strategy on US bonds. Perriello quotes ‘the recession is already over for the rich in this country, but the rest of us are miserable without a sign of our recession ending’. But Warren, she has turned into the true canary in the coal mine. And she looks near as though her hope is eroding.
2) Anthony Wiener didn’t have to be in the room to still be kicking Republican ass. John Shadegg, the baby lifter, is on the show trying to not be a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance. He sounds like a salesman you would try and avoid. Like the guy that the second after you sign his deal, his demeanor changes to ‘you work for me now’. There you are, feeling like if you don’t talk at the speed of light and create cocktail talking points at a rate of 5 per second, Anthony Wiener wins, and he is not even in the room.
Yea, I know, it seems like I’m doing the denial, that Democrats are equally guilty of allowing special interest to poison the well, that the mandate is in both current bills, that unions are preventing some of the competition that would help the overall market. But the bottom line is that the Republicans sound great now, but were silent for their run. They will get their chance to put those three things into law only because the Democrats will have enacted the first blueprint to fix the system.
Your status quo is far more damaging than the compromises that are present to get that toughest first step completed. Don’t ever forget, the 16 years that the Republicans didn’t do a single thing to fix health care, and did something tragically grift-worthy with their prescription drug work, you were getting the lions share of the buy off from the benefiting lobbies. Your wholly owned subsidiary cashed checks that whole time. The only reason you’ve got all your good ideas out there now is that you’ve lost control of the spot light.
3) The jobs bill is a sad joke. Even today, MSNBC is running around touting the positive political gains of a win. What win? To win hollow victories really only cements the charge of mismanagement levied upon the White House. It’s time for the White House to turn MSNBC off, because they are entering an echo chamber that allows them to claim victory over meaningless gains. It’s like when Verizon is at the Lakers game and they draw a winner for a free cell phone. There are 20,000 people in the building when they do that. And 15,000 of them are smart enough to elicit a Bronx cheer when someone ‘wins’ a contract for $1400 of charged cell phone service by virtue of a ‘free’ phone.
It’s more important to circle back to Rep. Perriello. He is physically upset at the jobs bill. He is as upset at the jobs bill as Wiener is at Republican doublespeak and Democratic weakness. The common denominator? We need a youth movement that disallows placebo.
And as Morning Joe is the pre game show for the big summit, do you predict that it will feel anything like a youth movement at Blair House, or some really angry entrenched old guys who are locked into their many years of back room deals and can’t map a way forward?
Observations:
1) How can you watch Elizabeth Warren and not go out and start hoarding gold Krugerrands? I mean that’s a bleak outlook, the small signs are there that a big second financial struggle is upon us. The Norah O’Donnell question is the crux of it all, how has the financial industry been allowed to create a second precipice unchecked, and it’s an important point. That should be Mika asking that question. Currently the show needs to import someone to ask the connect the dots question. We have done nothing to prevent the next collapse and the second bubble is forming.
Buchanan brings up the Chinese divestment strategy on US bonds. Perriello quotes ‘the recession is already over for the rich in this country, but the rest of us are miserable without a sign of our recession ending’. But Warren, she has turned into the true canary in the coal mine. And she looks near as though her hope is eroding.
2) Anthony Wiener didn’t have to be in the room to still be kicking Republican ass. John Shadegg, the baby lifter, is on the show trying to not be a wholly owned subsidiary of the health insurance. He sounds like a salesman you would try and avoid. Like the guy that the second after you sign his deal, his demeanor changes to ‘you work for me now’. There you are, feeling like if you don’t talk at the speed of light and create cocktail talking points at a rate of 5 per second, Anthony Wiener wins, and he is not even in the room.
Yea, I know, it seems like I’m doing the denial, that Democrats are equally guilty of allowing special interest to poison the well, that the mandate is in both current bills, that unions are preventing some of the competition that would help the overall market. But the bottom line is that the Republicans sound great now, but were silent for their run. They will get their chance to put those three things into law only because the Democrats will have enacted the first blueprint to fix the system.
Your status quo is far more damaging than the compromises that are present to get that toughest first step completed. Don’t ever forget, the 16 years that the Republicans didn’t do a single thing to fix health care, and did something tragically grift-worthy with their prescription drug work, you were getting the lions share of the buy off from the benefiting lobbies. Your wholly owned subsidiary cashed checks that whole time. The only reason you’ve got all your good ideas out there now is that you’ve lost control of the spot light.
3) The jobs bill is a sad joke. Even today, MSNBC is running around touting the positive political gains of a win. What win? To win hollow victories really only cements the charge of mismanagement levied upon the White House. It’s time for the White House to turn MSNBC off, because they are entering an echo chamber that allows them to claim victory over meaningless gains. It’s like when Verizon is at the Lakers game and they draw a winner for a free cell phone. There are 20,000 people in the building when they do that. And 15,000 of them are smart enough to elicit a Bronx cheer when someone ‘wins’ a contract for $1400 of charged cell phone service by virtue of a ‘free’ phone.
It’s more important to circle back to Rep. Perriello. He is physically upset at the jobs bill. He is as upset at the jobs bill as Wiener is at Republican doublespeak and Democratic weakness. The common denominator? We need a youth movement that disallows placebo.
And as Morning Joe is the pre game show for the big summit, do you predict that it will feel anything like a youth movement at Blair House, or some really angry entrenched old guys who are locked into their many years of back room deals and can’t map a way forward?
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Surrounded By Populists
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 11th, 2010
Observations:
1) OK, so now I’m not so obsessed with Maria Bartiromo, because she was on the show for practically the whole morning and is like having the financial equivalent of an Al Qaeda double agent on. In one exchange, prior to Elizabeth Warren being on, Maria basically acted like your mean boss at Pizza Hut and said ‘Obama better stop being so leftist’ or face the consequences of Wall Street not supporting his presidency. That is so important, this is a person who has an early entry on the show and feels like there are no adversaries philosophically around her, so she can basically admit shoplifting American wealth from the middle class is OK, because we (Wall Street) said it was ok, now get back to work.
The only thing missing from this was how when Joe Scarborough tackled the backwards logic of Maria’s sentiment, he did not send the debate towards Joe Conason, who you know must’ve been seething. That was an unfortunate edit. But look, if you’re going to try and gain intelligence from double agent Maria, and she already has alluded to the Wall Street sentiment, that they know what they’re doing so stay out of the way, maybe this was strategy, for she must be willing to eclipse that data with some further even more significant watershed.
And watershed we got, because after Elizabeth Warren, cloaked in a ‘bank fees will cost jobs and be passed on to the consumer’ false ideology, which Conason heckled, was the real nugget: “proprietary trading didn’t cause the financial meltdown, sub prime mortgages did”. America, digest Wall Street’s internal thought process upon light of day, as they attempt to explain away their role in your disaster. That viewpoint is revolutionary for a number of reasons.
The securitization of sub prime mortgages in a hedge environment that included default swap insurance products is a direct product of proprietary trading. Proprietary trading is a trade a company does for itself and not for its client. Goldman sold securitized sub prime mortgages on behalf of clients, and then collected default swaps against them proprietarily. It wasn’t the first time they did this. It was oil for a while, it was dot com for a while, it was sub prime mortgages balanced by default swaps for a while. All bubbles, all ended badly, seemingly as if the proprietary trading was pushing those markets off a cliff on purpose, right Maria?
Maria makes two mistakes with one unhealthy view from the inside, because not only was proprietary trading a hierarchical financial pattern overseeing the sub prime crisis, today, funded by the government, the proprietary trading that is occurring is doing one thing very, very badly, it is not serving the US economy. To put it simply if your proprietary equation today was to find the cheapest manufacturer of an item in order to create wealth in a New York based trade, you would trade a US job to China instantly. To put it in a macro sense, the money being given to Goldman Sachs by the US Treasury is specifically monetizing the continuing destabilization of the US job economy. The tax payer is funding his own job loss and the profit from the trade is retained by Lloyd Blankfein.
And for 120 minutes, Maria Bartiromo was the face of that transaction. Willingly.
2) Elizabeth Warren has made a youtube moment for our time and it occurred today on Morning Joe. She called out the highest level of leadership: both the Wall Street crowd, and undoubtedly, Barack Obama himself. Her words said loudly, you’re either really dumb, or you’re committing a crime against the American people.
Praise to Joe Scarborough for trotting out the ‘transfer of wealth’ line in goading Maria, above, to spill the secrets of the castle. But it was not needed in the Warren segment, as she has become the populist and consumerist juggernaut for finance that Howard Dean is to health care.
“He doesn’t ask me for advice” quipped Warren about the President as she mused about the administration appearing for sale in trading ever weakening financial reform, that is more a securing of the status quo than reform, for campaign money. At this point, it’s obvious the only way to trust Tim Geithner, is if he works for Elizabeth Warren and she signs off on his work, Summers, same, Volker, same. President Obama, it’s right there for the taking.
“It’s not competition when you can legally contract competition away from a transaction”
“This is banks versus people”
You don’t need to add any observation to that.
3) All in all, Morning Joe continues on a hot streak of a previously unseen level. I wish they didn’t waste appearances by Conason and Haas, but that’s live television. They self edited altruism from the conversation with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, they have been relentless on getting Elizabeth Warren on and exposing the dangerous high level math going on in the financial world, versus the algebraic placation attempts by Maria Bartiromo, and not by making judgment but making the foundations of the two arguments stand to be judged themselves.
I feel like I felt yesterday. If it’s true that the White House has this show on in the morning, they have to be a bit on the despondent side. We all make mistakes, and when Bush made mistakes, he could just switch the channel to Fox. But Obama doesn’t have a base bathed in doublespeak and Orwellian message. When he tries to use that kind of messaging, his base actually revolts. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”. Your base does not hear higher order logic there, they hear capitulation.
This is going somewhere important. This president is neither conservative, nor liberal, centrist or extreme. He is looking for opportunity, but unfortunately each of his mandates feel more like a business deal than governing.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) OK, so now I’m not so obsessed with Maria Bartiromo, because she was on the show for practically the whole morning and is like having the financial equivalent of an Al Qaeda double agent on. In one exchange, prior to Elizabeth Warren being on, Maria basically acted like your mean boss at Pizza Hut and said ‘Obama better stop being so leftist’ or face the consequences of Wall Street not supporting his presidency. That is so important, this is a person who has an early entry on the show and feels like there are no adversaries philosophically around her, so she can basically admit shoplifting American wealth from the middle class is OK, because we (Wall Street) said it was ok, now get back to work.
The only thing missing from this was how when Joe Scarborough tackled the backwards logic of Maria’s sentiment, he did not send the debate towards Joe Conason, who you know must’ve been seething. That was an unfortunate edit. But look, if you’re going to try and gain intelligence from double agent Maria, and she already has alluded to the Wall Street sentiment, that they know what they’re doing so stay out of the way, maybe this was strategy, for she must be willing to eclipse that data with some further even more significant watershed.
And watershed we got, because after Elizabeth Warren, cloaked in a ‘bank fees will cost jobs and be passed on to the consumer’ false ideology, which Conason heckled, was the real nugget: “proprietary trading didn’t cause the financial meltdown, sub prime mortgages did”. America, digest Wall Street’s internal thought process upon light of day, as they attempt to explain away their role in your disaster. That viewpoint is revolutionary for a number of reasons.
The securitization of sub prime mortgages in a hedge environment that included default swap insurance products is a direct product of proprietary trading. Proprietary trading is a trade a company does for itself and not for its client. Goldman sold securitized sub prime mortgages on behalf of clients, and then collected default swaps against them proprietarily. It wasn’t the first time they did this. It was oil for a while, it was dot com for a while, it was sub prime mortgages balanced by default swaps for a while. All bubbles, all ended badly, seemingly as if the proprietary trading was pushing those markets off a cliff on purpose, right Maria?
Maria makes two mistakes with one unhealthy view from the inside, because not only was proprietary trading a hierarchical financial pattern overseeing the sub prime crisis, today, funded by the government, the proprietary trading that is occurring is doing one thing very, very badly, it is not serving the US economy. To put it simply if your proprietary equation today was to find the cheapest manufacturer of an item in order to create wealth in a New York based trade, you would trade a US job to China instantly. To put it in a macro sense, the money being given to Goldman Sachs by the US Treasury is specifically monetizing the continuing destabilization of the US job economy. The tax payer is funding his own job loss and the profit from the trade is retained by Lloyd Blankfein.
And for 120 minutes, Maria Bartiromo was the face of that transaction. Willingly.
2) Elizabeth Warren has made a youtube moment for our time and it occurred today on Morning Joe. She called out the highest level of leadership: both the Wall Street crowd, and undoubtedly, Barack Obama himself. Her words said loudly, you’re either really dumb, or you’re committing a crime against the American people.
Praise to Joe Scarborough for trotting out the ‘transfer of wealth’ line in goading Maria, above, to spill the secrets of the castle. But it was not needed in the Warren segment, as she has become the populist and consumerist juggernaut for finance that Howard Dean is to health care.
“He doesn’t ask me for advice” quipped Warren about the President as she mused about the administration appearing for sale in trading ever weakening financial reform, that is more a securing of the status quo than reform, for campaign money. At this point, it’s obvious the only way to trust Tim Geithner, is if he works for Elizabeth Warren and she signs off on his work, Summers, same, Volker, same. President Obama, it’s right there for the taking.
“It’s not competition when you can legally contract competition away from a transaction”
“This is banks versus people”
You don’t need to add any observation to that.
3) All in all, Morning Joe continues on a hot streak of a previously unseen level. I wish they didn’t waste appearances by Conason and Haas, but that’s live television. They self edited altruism from the conversation with Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, they have been relentless on getting Elizabeth Warren on and exposing the dangerous high level math going on in the financial world, versus the algebraic placation attempts by Maria Bartiromo, and not by making judgment but making the foundations of the two arguments stand to be judged themselves.
I feel like I felt yesterday. If it’s true that the White House has this show on in the morning, they have to be a bit on the despondent side. We all make mistakes, and when Bush made mistakes, he could just switch the channel to Fox. But Obama doesn’t have a base bathed in doublespeak and Orwellian message. When he tries to use that kind of messaging, his base actually revolts. “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”. Your base does not hear higher order logic there, they hear capitulation.
This is going somewhere important. This president is neither conservative, nor liberal, centrist or extreme. He is looking for opportunity, but unfortunately each of his mandates feel more like a business deal than governing.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Friday, February 5, 2010
In Like A Lion, Out Like A Lamb
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for February 5th, 2010
Observations:
1) I guess I made a mistake yesterday when I said I agreed with Joe Scarborough on most of the issues on health reform. Because today, it was Joe Scarborough the voodoo science obstructionist, conjuring up brand new numbers out of the air for the same old talking points, not even platform or policy, but talking points.
Joe’s math is now ‘60% of Americans don’t want health care reform’. It was 75% last week. Neither number is anywhere near the heart of sentiment on the matter. And nothing constructive can come from this message, that is so JS 5 months ago, that IT is dead and we should move on.
I want the current health care bill dead. I came out in support of the Dean decision that very day, and wrote both Senators Boxer and Feinstein asking that they vote against it. I itemized that more was lost than gained, the new coverage of 31 million was achieved by making uninsured people scofflaws if they didn’t buy a policy under the same awful conditions that exist in status quo, and that the pre-existing conditions part of the legislation was nothing more than a sound bite with no real enforcement that would create an additional cat and mouse game between insurers and hapless regulators.
Further, I’ve come out with a model for piecing together the good items into enforceable law in a bipartisan way and without loopholes, the leadership horse trade, and identified the mission as creating a hyper efficient private insurance model with strict accountability towards free market and full coverage. No state lines, no preexisting conditions under threat of lifetime liability, repeal of anti trust, and tort management.
Lastly, Joe parroting those old scripts is infuriating because we have uncovered in the last 5 months several anomalies that make American’s judgment of the issue the result of conflict of interest on almost every level. Massachusetts voters had universal coverage and thus were essentially voting a no new taxes mandate so they didn’t have to pay insurance cost for citizens of other states. Employed workers across the country are being victimized by propaganda that it will be reform that costs them insurance instead of the loss of a job or a cancellation by an insurance company on a technicality leaving them without a safety net. Uninsured are being told to vote against any mandate as a violation of their American freedoms.
And that leaves one small group of advocates. Americans who work for small businesses below the group threshold, are unemployed, are self employed or have some similar commonality that makes them outside of the reach of group insurance. Those people got news yesterday far worse than the Joe Scarborough betrayal of their trust. Blue Cross Anthem told 2.5 million California individual policy holders that they were getting a premium increase of 39% on March 1st. The average policy cost for a family of four is moving from $20,134 to $27,336 per year. Blue Cross Blue Shield have a near monopoly in this state. And there is zero regulatory recourse. The only thing that Blue Cross Anthem has to prove is that at least 70% of premiums make it to health care for covered patients. That’s not insurance anymore, that’s a siphon.
Joe Scarborough, stop with the talking points and become an advocate for an immediate solution, 2.5 million people found out yesterday, while you were in their state, how bad they need you to get this right.
2) Obama, the bad juggler part 2. Mike Allen revealed side by side today that the administration got chewed out by the junior Senator from Minnesota Al Franken, who at this point is the heir apparent to the Howard Dean lucidity throne, and then promptly that same administration sent legislators on the road to a jobs bill without a map.
If this is true, it is another major setback for an administration that is now getting Carter comparisons daily. I’m not one of them. But I’ve used the words feckless, hapless, vacuum of leadership, and rookie to describe what we saw in 2009 and as 2010 gets underway, to see the same needs to be a call to action for all of us.
Franken went off saying everything we have discussed about a lack of leadership on the issues, and went specifically after David Axelrod. Sound familiar? I remember the day that the health bill turned into untenable sausage and Howard Dean came out against it. I remember how Axelrod came out not asking to look at the issues, but to sell the talking points, and asking not for understanding but loyalty. That’s an outrage. It was an outrage listening to Senators turned into doublespeak salesmen, it was an outrage seeing the opposite of necessity nearly enacted into law, it was an outrage to have proven the opposition right.
I went to bed that night thinking maybe football is fixed and Oliver Stone’s Mr. X was the closest I would come to the truth in this lifetime.
Scarborough is the opposition, not the extremists like Limbaugh or Erickson. We have to be the example of the availability of bipartisan progress here, so the drill in the coming days is the same as oft described here: get the good people on the set, Dean, Warren, Krugman, and come out of the 10 minute segments with 4 consensus parts to a solution to each of the demons plaguing America right now, Health, Finance and Jobs.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Observations:
1) I guess I made a mistake yesterday when I said I agreed with Joe Scarborough on most of the issues on health reform. Because today, it was Joe Scarborough the voodoo science obstructionist, conjuring up brand new numbers out of the air for the same old talking points, not even platform or policy, but talking points.
Joe’s math is now ‘60% of Americans don’t want health care reform’. It was 75% last week. Neither number is anywhere near the heart of sentiment on the matter. And nothing constructive can come from this message, that is so JS 5 months ago, that IT is dead and we should move on.
I want the current health care bill dead. I came out in support of the Dean decision that very day, and wrote both Senators Boxer and Feinstein asking that they vote against it. I itemized that more was lost than gained, the new coverage of 31 million was achieved by making uninsured people scofflaws if they didn’t buy a policy under the same awful conditions that exist in status quo, and that the pre-existing conditions part of the legislation was nothing more than a sound bite with no real enforcement that would create an additional cat and mouse game between insurers and hapless regulators.
Further, I’ve come out with a model for piecing together the good items into enforceable law in a bipartisan way and without loopholes, the leadership horse trade, and identified the mission as creating a hyper efficient private insurance model with strict accountability towards free market and full coverage. No state lines, no preexisting conditions under threat of lifetime liability, repeal of anti trust, and tort management.
Lastly, Joe parroting those old scripts is infuriating because we have uncovered in the last 5 months several anomalies that make American’s judgment of the issue the result of conflict of interest on almost every level. Massachusetts voters had universal coverage and thus were essentially voting a no new taxes mandate so they didn’t have to pay insurance cost for citizens of other states. Employed workers across the country are being victimized by propaganda that it will be reform that costs them insurance instead of the loss of a job or a cancellation by an insurance company on a technicality leaving them without a safety net. Uninsured are being told to vote against any mandate as a violation of their American freedoms.
And that leaves one small group of advocates. Americans who work for small businesses below the group threshold, are unemployed, are self employed or have some similar commonality that makes them outside of the reach of group insurance. Those people got news yesterday far worse than the Joe Scarborough betrayal of their trust. Blue Cross Anthem told 2.5 million California individual policy holders that they were getting a premium increase of 39% on March 1st. The average policy cost for a family of four is moving from $20,134 to $27,336 per year. Blue Cross Blue Shield have a near monopoly in this state. And there is zero regulatory recourse. The only thing that Blue Cross Anthem has to prove is that at least 70% of premiums make it to health care for covered patients. That’s not insurance anymore, that’s a siphon.
Joe Scarborough, stop with the talking points and become an advocate for an immediate solution, 2.5 million people found out yesterday, while you were in their state, how bad they need you to get this right.
2) Obama, the bad juggler part 2. Mike Allen revealed side by side today that the administration got chewed out by the junior Senator from Minnesota Al Franken, who at this point is the heir apparent to the Howard Dean lucidity throne, and then promptly that same administration sent legislators on the road to a jobs bill without a map.
If this is true, it is another major setback for an administration that is now getting Carter comparisons daily. I’m not one of them. But I’ve used the words feckless, hapless, vacuum of leadership, and rookie to describe what we saw in 2009 and as 2010 gets underway, to see the same needs to be a call to action for all of us.
Franken went off saying everything we have discussed about a lack of leadership on the issues, and went specifically after David Axelrod. Sound familiar? I remember the day that the health bill turned into untenable sausage and Howard Dean came out against it. I remember how Axelrod came out not asking to look at the issues, but to sell the talking points, and asking not for understanding but loyalty. That’s an outrage. It was an outrage listening to Senators turned into doublespeak salesmen, it was an outrage seeing the opposite of necessity nearly enacted into law, it was an outrage to have proven the opposition right.
I went to bed that night thinking maybe football is fixed and Oliver Stone’s Mr. X was the closest I would come to the truth in this lifetime.
Scarborough is the opposition, not the extremists like Limbaugh or Erickson. We have to be the example of the availability of bipartisan progress here, so the drill in the coming days is the same as oft described here: get the good people on the set, Dean, Warren, Krugman, and come out of the 10 minute segments with 4 consensus parts to a solution to each of the demons plaguing America right now, Health, Finance and Jobs.
That’s all for today, see you Monday
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
It’s Time To Play Some Dodgeball
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 20th, 2010
Observations:
1) Here's how bipartisan progress should work: the majority and minority leaders and the committee chairmen of the various health care related committees get together in a binding selection framework.
Harry Reid gets to go first and says “no pre existing conditions” , Mitch McConnell gets to go second and says “tort reform” , Nancy Pelosi goes third and says “end to antitrust exemption”, John Boehner goes last and says “rescind state line limitations”
The two sides go back and huddle up for a day. And come back and see if there is a phase two selection. The selection is sudden death and there are five available attempts to get the first set of 4 selections complete or the process is scuttled for the congressional session. So if anyone says something and the following chooser says I can’t agree to that, the selection process is scuttled, and goes back to what we have now.
If any party says public option, the process is likely killed, if either party says unfunded mandate, the process is likely killed, but if the bipartisan horse trading results in progress for the free market system, we all win. Obviously, John Boehner could say with his last vote, “John Boehner for termless king” but that likely wouldn’t get 60 votes. Nor would abortion restriction, nor would medicare for all.
But what would happen is if the 4 things we need the most in the existing system were progressed in a bipartisan manner, it would avoid omnibus pig troughs and limit amendments and earmarks. That’s the rules in horse trading, an amendment is a fifth selection, and that wasn’t the bipartisan deal.
2) There is no doubt that the Brown victory is a victory for the American people. The American people gave Obama a fair chance to make his case, and his case was as popular as Ishtar. Health care has proven to be a feckless giveaway on par with the stimulus, which consensus says was misguided beyond all doubt.
Goldman Sachs, big pharma, the insurance industry, and the ethanol lobby all have a closer relationship with this administration than any citizen who voted for this President, thus making the lion’s share of his election mandate appear to be an absolute fraud to an angry electorate.
Blaming centrism for dilution and corporate giveaway is making matters worse. You are beholden to Lieberman and Nelson because you did not talk to the whole Republican party, just a couple of tokens. This was your own doing.
This math could’ve been overcome several ways, but they all had a common necessity: leadership. When we’re selecting managers for industry, we look to see if they manage by crisis or are out in front of potential trouble spots allowing at least some of them to be reduced to managed events rather than blowups. It’s been blowup after blowup after blowup on this executive’s watch, and he has just been made accountable.
3) As an optimist, I’m ready for year two to be Obama the tornado. What Bill Clinton found out early on, is that you sign the checks yourself. Clinton micromanaged and immersed like no President before him. He was obviously fluent in everything from Bosnia, to the oppositions contract with America.
You have every opportunity to be the ball in year two, and it starts with the horse trade above as an admission that you have not achieved your bipartisan goals and will need to reinvigorate that process to finish this health care agenda once and for all. A horse trade version of health care can be through the legislature in weeks. Make those leaders make that deal in your office, make them show up every Monday at 8 am until its done. That’s what being an executive is all about, they all work for you, including the opposition.
But it can’t stop there, you are going to need to clean house in Treasury. Austan Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to move reform forward unencumbered by the industry interests. Your staff are directly executing the industry’s agenda, visible to voters who are choosing to vote against you until this changes.
Lastly, this Mohammed trial is a domestic loser beyond all scope. Now that it’s not Dick Cheney shooting holes in your patriotism, its Democratic voters saying they had no idea you we’re this far off of the grid when it comes to using our courts to protect the rights of admitted terrorists, your choice is clear. Let’s rush on domestic needs and slow down on Guantanamo and banning Tribunals until we can catch our breath on this. It appears you have grossly overcomplicated the already complicated.
We are at a historic crossroads. One more wrong move and this country will look a lot like what’s going on in Russia right now with our own Putin named Romney. I don’t think we have much longer to fight that off. And if that happens to us, how many other great societies go with us?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) Here's how bipartisan progress should work: the majority and minority leaders and the committee chairmen of the various health care related committees get together in a binding selection framework.
Harry Reid gets to go first and says “no pre existing conditions” , Mitch McConnell gets to go second and says “tort reform” , Nancy Pelosi goes third and says “end to antitrust exemption”, John Boehner goes last and says “rescind state line limitations”
The two sides go back and huddle up for a day. And come back and see if there is a phase two selection. The selection is sudden death and there are five available attempts to get the first set of 4 selections complete or the process is scuttled for the congressional session. So if anyone says something and the following chooser says I can’t agree to that, the selection process is scuttled, and goes back to what we have now.
If any party says public option, the process is likely killed, if either party says unfunded mandate, the process is likely killed, but if the bipartisan horse trading results in progress for the free market system, we all win. Obviously, John Boehner could say with his last vote, “John Boehner for termless king” but that likely wouldn’t get 60 votes. Nor would abortion restriction, nor would medicare for all.
But what would happen is if the 4 things we need the most in the existing system were progressed in a bipartisan manner, it would avoid omnibus pig troughs and limit amendments and earmarks. That’s the rules in horse trading, an amendment is a fifth selection, and that wasn’t the bipartisan deal.
2) There is no doubt that the Brown victory is a victory for the American people. The American people gave Obama a fair chance to make his case, and his case was as popular as Ishtar. Health care has proven to be a feckless giveaway on par with the stimulus, which consensus says was misguided beyond all doubt.
Goldman Sachs, big pharma, the insurance industry, and the ethanol lobby all have a closer relationship with this administration than any citizen who voted for this President, thus making the lion’s share of his election mandate appear to be an absolute fraud to an angry electorate.
Blaming centrism for dilution and corporate giveaway is making matters worse. You are beholden to Lieberman and Nelson because you did not talk to the whole Republican party, just a couple of tokens. This was your own doing.
This math could’ve been overcome several ways, but they all had a common necessity: leadership. When we’re selecting managers for industry, we look to see if they manage by crisis or are out in front of potential trouble spots allowing at least some of them to be reduced to managed events rather than blowups. It’s been blowup after blowup after blowup on this executive’s watch, and he has just been made accountable.
3) As an optimist, I’m ready for year two to be Obama the tornado. What Bill Clinton found out early on, is that you sign the checks yourself. Clinton micromanaged and immersed like no President before him. He was obviously fluent in everything from Bosnia, to the oppositions contract with America.
You have every opportunity to be the ball in year two, and it starts with the horse trade above as an admission that you have not achieved your bipartisan goals and will need to reinvigorate that process to finish this health care agenda once and for all. A horse trade version of health care can be through the legislature in weeks. Make those leaders make that deal in your office, make them show up every Monday at 8 am until its done. That’s what being an executive is all about, they all work for you, including the opposition.
But it can’t stop there, you are going to need to clean house in Treasury. Austan Goolsbee and Elizabeth Warren have to move reform forward unencumbered by the industry interests. Your staff are directly executing the industry’s agenda, visible to voters who are choosing to vote against you until this changes.
Lastly, this Mohammed trial is a domestic loser beyond all scope. Now that it’s not Dick Cheney shooting holes in your patriotism, its Democratic voters saying they had no idea you we’re this far off of the grid when it comes to using our courts to protect the rights of admitted terrorists, your choice is clear. Let’s rush on domestic needs and slow down on Guantanamo and banning Tribunals until we can catch our breath on this. It appears you have grossly overcomplicated the already complicated.
We are at a historic crossroads. One more wrong move and this country will look a lot like what’s going on in Russia right now with our own Putin named Romney. I don’t think we have much longer to fight that off. And if that happens to us, how many other great societies go with us?
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Athena, On Parade
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for January 14th, 2010
Observations:
1) Mika, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, Erin Burnett, Kathleen Sebelius, Today’s Ann Curry: every guest of consequence was female today and with all of the talk of Anne Kornblut's book documenting the glass ceiling, it appears Mika Brzezinski has other ideas. The powerhouse performance by Valerie Jarrett, shows an administration evolving and brings us hope that 2010 will have a new face to replace the 2009 sit on the sidelines and let the vacuum rule version. Hillary Clinton is always a powerhouse, and the tapping of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is an important step, even if artificial, to help the shouting men in opposing camps take a breath for a second, and remind a country what unity feels like.
This guest parade is not by design, but it’s a telling coincidence especially in the face of a disaster that the face of leadership today of all days had a female lead.
2) It can be said that real reform in our country has happened maybe twice in our generation’s adult life, since LBJ. Once when Ronald Reagan reformed how our income taxes worked, and once when George W. Bush reformed another country, Iraq. Some may want to argue about welfare reform, but we won’t see the effect of that reform until this first real recession since it’s inception plays out and see if we made life during difficult times better or worse.
That Bush wants to call prescription drug revisions on his watch reform, and that Obama is trotting out the word reform on his revision of health services should fall under FCPA “truth in advertising ” statutes. The reason that this is germane towards today’s conversation is the mandate in Massachusetts. Those people aren’t scaring the daylights out of Democrats because they want a Republican. It’s a referendum on the bait and switch that’s gone on for two years now by the Obama administration. The progressives feel baited by a promise of real reform, and are stunned that the Obama camp conceded the high ground without a fight.
There is some of the misleading activity still going on, with the anti trust repeal threats, the national exchange endorsement, the union meetings. But the verdict win or lose in Massachusetts is that Obama is wolf boy until proven otherwise. The ball is in your court.
2) The Warren interview appeared to be a fraction of its possible outcome. The chief missing element was not connecting the dots from the prized Andrew Ross Sorkin statement yesterday about “the greatest transfer of wealth in our lifetime". Let me remind you that part of the show’s mission has to be about finding consensus. That criticism for the ARS statement yesterday was about 6 months of omission of an obvious megatrend being very disturbing, to omit it again with both Warren and Jarrett today, I feel like you should give your paycheck back.
And this thing that Erin Burnett brought up about the scapegoating of the banks by the administration is indefensible. That’s like going to a Miami bank with Tony Montana standing outside with a machine gun, and saying you guys are fine laundering, its that drug dealer that’s the whole problem. The banks provided a necessary vehicle to the hedge funds in the market collapse that was a violation of their fiduciary responsibility by any version of universal law. The fact that they had lobbied our legislative bodies to legalize portions of the crime doesn’t make it OK, especially given the disastrous outcomes. The message at the end of the day is that there will always be Tony Montanas and hedge funds, but by being a bank you are expected by custodial provision to be high enough on the food chain to not make a problem exponentially worse for profit.
Erin’s usually the sharpest in the room on financial matters, but a great amount of care has to be levied to counterbalance what will be a white noise war coming from people on her right in the coming days, as they crouch into fox holes and will apparently try to put a lipstick anywhere that might help or at least distract their foes.
At the end of the day, Obama will win if the next bank is scared into saying we better get some proportion of all loans to domestic growth industries else we appear to be in need of rehab. I’d call it reform, but let’s keep expectations bounded by facts on the ground.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Observations:
1) Mika, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, Erin Burnett, Kathleen Sebelius, Today’s Ann Curry: every guest of consequence was female today and with all of the talk of Anne Kornblut's book documenting the glass ceiling, it appears Mika Brzezinski has other ideas. The powerhouse performance by Valerie Jarrett, shows an administration evolving and brings us hope that 2010 will have a new face to replace the 2009 sit on the sidelines and let the vacuum rule version. Hillary Clinton is always a powerhouse, and the tapping of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is an important step, even if artificial, to help the shouting men in opposing camps take a breath for a second, and remind a country what unity feels like.
This guest parade is not by design, but it’s a telling coincidence especially in the face of a disaster that the face of leadership today of all days had a female lead.
2) It can be said that real reform in our country has happened maybe twice in our generation’s adult life, since LBJ. Once when Ronald Reagan reformed how our income taxes worked, and once when George W. Bush reformed another country, Iraq. Some may want to argue about welfare reform, but we won’t see the effect of that reform until this first real recession since it’s inception plays out and see if we made life during difficult times better or worse.
That Bush wants to call prescription drug revisions on his watch reform, and that Obama is trotting out the word reform on his revision of health services should fall under FCPA “truth in advertising ” statutes. The reason that this is germane towards today’s conversation is the mandate in Massachusetts. Those people aren’t scaring the daylights out of Democrats because they want a Republican. It’s a referendum on the bait and switch that’s gone on for two years now by the Obama administration. The progressives feel baited by a promise of real reform, and are stunned that the Obama camp conceded the high ground without a fight.
There is some of the misleading activity still going on, with the anti trust repeal threats, the national exchange endorsement, the union meetings. But the verdict win or lose in Massachusetts is that Obama is wolf boy until proven otherwise. The ball is in your court.
2) The Warren interview appeared to be a fraction of its possible outcome. The chief missing element was not connecting the dots from the prized Andrew Ross Sorkin statement yesterday about “the greatest transfer of wealth in our lifetime". Let me remind you that part of the show’s mission has to be about finding consensus. That criticism for the ARS statement yesterday was about 6 months of omission of an obvious megatrend being very disturbing, to omit it again with both Warren and Jarrett today, I feel like you should give your paycheck back.
And this thing that Erin Burnett brought up about the scapegoating of the banks by the administration is indefensible. That’s like going to a Miami bank with Tony Montana standing outside with a machine gun, and saying you guys are fine laundering, its that drug dealer that’s the whole problem. The banks provided a necessary vehicle to the hedge funds in the market collapse that was a violation of their fiduciary responsibility by any version of universal law. The fact that they had lobbied our legislative bodies to legalize portions of the crime doesn’t make it OK, especially given the disastrous outcomes. The message at the end of the day is that there will always be Tony Montanas and hedge funds, but by being a bank you are expected by custodial provision to be high enough on the food chain to not make a problem exponentially worse for profit.
Erin’s usually the sharpest in the room on financial matters, but a great amount of care has to be levied to counterbalance what will be a white noise war coming from people on her right in the coming days, as they crouch into fox holes and will apparently try to put a lipstick anywhere that might help or at least distract their foes.
At the end of the day, Obama will win if the next bank is scared into saying we better get some proportion of all loans to domestic growth industries else we appear to be in need of rehab. I’d call it reform, but let’s keep expectations bounded by facts on the ground.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Morning Jobs
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 10th 2009
Observations:
1) OK, the jobs vigil will take a holiday. This morning the team played off of yesterdays green shoots and came cast-wide with the first primitive underpinnings of practical job growth analysis. Mike Barnicle’s historical references to governments fully agendized towards job growth, the recognition of analyst Andrew Ross Sorkin’s resurrection of our manufacturing belt requirement and even the cataloging of Tuesday’s Alabama gubernatorial interview as a great idea but exemplifying why innovation based job resurrection will always be better. These are solid steps.
The concept here, that we better look at innovation based jobs, is an important element that the show should be credited for getting into. If we take the Mercedes jobs, our workers are commoditized. Joe Scarborough cites tax and union policy as to why those jobs are coming to Alabama rather than the Northeast, but doesn’t really understand that’s at best a mixed bag success. And, let’s get some substantive proof that $75,000 and full family health insurance and a G-class is a target compensation package for that Alabama worker lest we appear to be making a wishful assumption.
2) It should be no surprise that Joe Scarborough switched sides on the participation of President Obama in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him. At first, the discomfort of the nation watching its young President travel to receive an award built on mere aspiration at a time of increasing its war bidding and desperate needs of domestic execution seemed paramount, but upon reflection of what can be gained by reminding the rest of the world of our country’s accomplishments on their behalf, of our role to countermand evil in the world and our commitment to reevaluate even ourselves to re-commit towards proper human rights principles even in times of war, our President turned this from awkward to opportunity.
The problem is Iran. It was touched on in the show, touched on in the speech, but there is no existing global strategy to avoid that country’s nuclear proliferation simultaneous to its suppression of the will of it’s population. You can talk all you want, award prizes all you want, but until a mechanism is developed that effectively disallows the flouting of the principles covered in the President’s speech today, we will be led to war after war after war. Iran’s case is special because the collateral damage in an armed conflict represents what might be the most enlightened tipping point available to the entire Muslim conundrum. If your last resort bombs kill significant numbers of 140 IQ wielding anti-Revolutionary Guard Muslims, the loss may just define success or more likely failure of the next 60 years in the region. There has to be a better way.
Most importantly, if you want to tackle North Korea or the Congo, you have to solve this higher order problem with such a degree of certainty that it vaccinates those primitive parts of the world from replicating them.
3) Let’s put the subject of the dissolution of the middle class into the mix. There is a pattern on Morning Joe to make a gloss reference to an issue for a period of time, then cite a credible reference as a phase two inception, then, like what happened today, you bring on Elizabeth Warren to try and get it to a full blown shooting war. I love that this is important like jobs were important to Mike Barnicle. My problem is this is continuing evidence of the 30,000 feet lack of detail ethic on the Morning Joe show and it hurts your agenda.
If you were to want to get out there on a subject, your strength would be better administered if you got out there on a ‘facts on the ground’ basis. This was my chief criticism of your months of droning about jobs before you attempted to really understand the mechanics of the issue, which may not have actually started until YESTERDAY.
When you’re talking about the dissolution of the middle class, it is a distribution of wealth issue. Jobs are a symptom. Granted, a symptom on a grander scale than witnessed in recent memory, but nonetheless just a part of the polynomial. Lets construct just the first few parts:
· Taxes are at a 70 year low.
· Health care is at an all time high.
· Pensions are destructible via either a market collapse or a corporate strategy of chapter 11 bankruptcy.
· 401k’s are not pensions.
· Previously free goods like gasoline are now double-digit household expenditures.
· Jobs are the most commoditized they’ve ever been.
· Usury laws have been repealed resulting in predatory corporate behavior.
· Housing is based on mirage micro-economics and those often nightmare consequences have been endorsed by the US government.
· Educational effectiveness is declining generation over generation.
· Our prison population has exploded and its culture has found its way into our middle class where the two cultures previously rarely interacted.
OK, it’s a polynomial in the thousands of degrees, but its roots are displayed right there.
The net result is the distribution of wealth in this country has made two dividing lines move. The super rich are nominally more, but proportionately less and in possession of a greater amount of the nation’s assets then before. The middle class and the poverty line have moved closer, and closer to becoming one class.
We can catalog some solutions, but until all parties of this debate take concrete steps towards understanding the phenomena creating our current movement, those solutions won’t make sense. It also seems fair to point out that a majority of the politicians we have in office either don’t comprehend this megatrend, or are being paid to ship their conscience to Siberia by a corporate culture run amok.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Observations:
1) OK, the jobs vigil will take a holiday. This morning the team played off of yesterdays green shoots and came cast-wide with the first primitive underpinnings of practical job growth analysis. Mike Barnicle’s historical references to governments fully agendized towards job growth, the recognition of analyst Andrew Ross Sorkin’s resurrection of our manufacturing belt requirement and even the cataloging of Tuesday’s Alabama gubernatorial interview as a great idea but exemplifying why innovation based job resurrection will always be better. These are solid steps.
The concept here, that we better look at innovation based jobs, is an important element that the show should be credited for getting into. If we take the Mercedes jobs, our workers are commoditized. Joe Scarborough cites tax and union policy as to why those jobs are coming to Alabama rather than the Northeast, but doesn’t really understand that’s at best a mixed bag success. And, let’s get some substantive proof that $75,000 and full family health insurance and a G-class is a target compensation package for that Alabama worker lest we appear to be making a wishful assumption.
2) It should be no surprise that Joe Scarborough switched sides on the participation of President Obama in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him. At first, the discomfort of the nation watching its young President travel to receive an award built on mere aspiration at a time of increasing its war bidding and desperate needs of domestic execution seemed paramount, but upon reflection of what can be gained by reminding the rest of the world of our country’s accomplishments on their behalf, of our role to countermand evil in the world and our commitment to reevaluate even ourselves to re-commit towards proper human rights principles even in times of war, our President turned this from awkward to opportunity.
The problem is Iran. It was touched on in the show, touched on in the speech, but there is no existing global strategy to avoid that country’s nuclear proliferation simultaneous to its suppression of the will of it’s population. You can talk all you want, award prizes all you want, but until a mechanism is developed that effectively disallows the flouting of the principles covered in the President’s speech today, we will be led to war after war after war. Iran’s case is special because the collateral damage in an armed conflict represents what might be the most enlightened tipping point available to the entire Muslim conundrum. If your last resort bombs kill significant numbers of 140 IQ wielding anti-Revolutionary Guard Muslims, the loss may just define success or more likely failure of the next 60 years in the region. There has to be a better way.
Most importantly, if you want to tackle North Korea or the Congo, you have to solve this higher order problem with such a degree of certainty that it vaccinates those primitive parts of the world from replicating them.
3) Let’s put the subject of the dissolution of the middle class into the mix. There is a pattern on Morning Joe to make a gloss reference to an issue for a period of time, then cite a credible reference as a phase two inception, then, like what happened today, you bring on Elizabeth Warren to try and get it to a full blown shooting war. I love that this is important like jobs were important to Mike Barnicle. My problem is this is continuing evidence of the 30,000 feet lack of detail ethic on the Morning Joe show and it hurts your agenda.
If you were to want to get out there on a subject, your strength would be better administered if you got out there on a ‘facts on the ground’ basis. This was my chief criticism of your months of droning about jobs before you attempted to really understand the mechanics of the issue, which may not have actually started until YESTERDAY.
When you’re talking about the dissolution of the middle class, it is a distribution of wealth issue. Jobs are a symptom. Granted, a symptom on a grander scale than witnessed in recent memory, but nonetheless just a part of the polynomial. Lets construct just the first few parts:
· Taxes are at a 70 year low.
· Health care is at an all time high.
· Pensions are destructible via either a market collapse or a corporate strategy of chapter 11 bankruptcy.
· 401k’s are not pensions.
· Previously free goods like gasoline are now double-digit household expenditures.
· Jobs are the most commoditized they’ve ever been.
· Usury laws have been repealed resulting in predatory corporate behavior.
· Housing is based on mirage micro-economics and those often nightmare consequences have been endorsed by the US government.
· Educational effectiveness is declining generation over generation.
· Our prison population has exploded and its culture has found its way into our middle class where the two cultures previously rarely interacted.
OK, it’s a polynomial in the thousands of degrees, but its roots are displayed right there.
The net result is the distribution of wealth in this country has made two dividing lines move. The super rich are nominally more, but proportionately less and in possession of a greater amount of the nation’s assets then before. The middle class and the poverty line have moved closer, and closer to becoming one class.
We can catalog some solutions, but until all parties of this debate take concrete steps towards understanding the phenomena creating our current movement, those solutions won’t make sense. It also seems fair to point out that a majority of the politicians we have in office either don’t comprehend this megatrend, or are being paid to ship their conscience to Siberia by a corporate culture run amok.
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Morning Phoner
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for December 3, 2009
Anyone would have to phone one in after the powerhouse of a show held on December 2nd. It’s forgivable. The balance of the day was devoted to TMZ material and it makes you wonder:
When is Willie Geist going to phoenix up on us and become the next Keith Olbermann? You know there’s thoughts and stuff going on in there, but obedient to his less is more mantra, he is set to stay muzzled so that he doesn’t wake up one day and feel like an extraneous third opinion. We have had two shows in a week that he could’ve anchored. That is a rare occurrence and if it happened more, it would highlight the understated part of his game. Keep playing under kid, else you’ll seem like Dylan Ratigan who is lost in a self manufactured perpetual catch up.
Observations:
1) Your jobs segments are weak. You recently demonstrated an understandable position on Afghanistan after spending months drifting with the tide. As a learning moment, shore up what you think and get it out there. Days like today where it should be front and center are when you’re exposed on this as the features on your show outweigh this serious issue.
2) Any day you gloss over Elizabeth Warren is a loss for America.
3) Comcast is your new boss. It’s disheartening to think that the money that strengthened Comcast to this point came from a $1000 entertainment charge per household per year dating back to 1982. Prior to that television was free. But don’t get comfortable, consumers are on a mission to take control of their entertainment choices, wresting them away from monopolistic cable systems, and taking their dollars with them. Go ask a record company if it has any advice for cable service providers in regards to the Internet diluting their price support, and you will see your future.
That’s all for today, tomorrow is Friday, one more time, with feeling?
Anyone would have to phone one in after the powerhouse of a show held on December 2nd. It’s forgivable. The balance of the day was devoted to TMZ material and it makes you wonder:
When is Willie Geist going to phoenix up on us and become the next Keith Olbermann? You know there’s thoughts and stuff going on in there, but obedient to his less is more mantra, he is set to stay muzzled so that he doesn’t wake up one day and feel like an extraneous third opinion. We have had two shows in a week that he could’ve anchored. That is a rare occurrence and if it happened more, it would highlight the understated part of his game. Keep playing under kid, else you’ll seem like Dylan Ratigan who is lost in a self manufactured perpetual catch up.
Observations:
1) Your jobs segments are weak. You recently demonstrated an understandable position on Afghanistan after spending months drifting with the tide. As a learning moment, shore up what you think and get it out there. Days like today where it should be front and center are when you’re exposed on this as the features on your show outweigh this serious issue.
2) Any day you gloss over Elizabeth Warren is a loss for America.
3) Comcast is your new boss. It’s disheartening to think that the money that strengthened Comcast to this point came from a $1000 entertainment charge per household per year dating back to 1982. Prior to that television was free. But don’t get comfortable, consumers are on a mission to take control of their entertainment choices, wresting them away from monopolistic cable systems, and taking their dollars with them. Go ask a record company if it has any advice for cable service providers in regards to the Internet diluting their price support, and you will see your future.
That’s all for today, tomorrow is Friday, one more time, with feeling?
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