The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 12th, 2010
Observations:
1) Dylan Ratigan is a Mona Lisa of unexplained complexity. His efforts on the show today dragged the conversation up the food chain from the superficial to the, well, less superficial. Dylan explained to America that you can cut all you want but that austerity is not an equation for recapitalization. Wait, I did that in 14 words, it took Dylan 5400 and his message was diluted for its lack of cohesion.
Fresh off of his voter suppression efforts, Joe Scarborough was all to happy to edit out the progressive message that dubbed the deficit commission the “cat food commission”. That is suppression of another kind, but Joe’s greater argument that the extremes on both sides unduly control the debate allows this kind of editing. He has a point, a point I wish I could recall him enforcing in August of 2009 at the heat of the death panel scare.
So it was a great relief that Dylan couldn’t control the conversation and that Joe could just mock his inability to boil a matter down. It was a great relief because it would show that had Dylan not been there and Joe would have interviewed David Walker by himself, they would have never brought up revenue. That conversation, which happens way too often on Morning Joe, the one void of depth and in shallow pursuit of a key operating objective, exposes the show to its chief criticism that it only finds depth accidentally but left to its own devices is a magnet for superficiality.
Bravo for the show’s self awareness, for it’s relentless pursuit of depth, for knowing that if it was just Joe and Mika talking they would aggregate to less than Bill Karin’s segment.
Now if only Dylan could take an extension class on clarity, or at least the transfer of clarity from one’s mind to one’s rocket ship.
2) Not since the southeastern gas crisis in 2008 have we seen such an effort to blackout the media. I am of course talking about the rocket launch that occurred Monday off of the coast of California and has been dismissed with the most juvenile assertions from the government, its as if they are begging the country to dig deeper.
I can’t in good faith go into the story, as it would just lump me in with the Mel Gibson ‘Conspiracy Theory’ crowd, but I often look at the Morning Joe show as a bellwether for this blackout lever. Why? Because Joe Scarborough is at once very close to the intelligence community of Washington, DC, and a terrible, terrible liar. He is so bad at acting that when the obligatory brush off move comes up like it did 2 days ago on the air live, you can actually learn quite a bit about ‘the fix’ by watching his mannerisms.
I know, I know, that show “Lie To Me” is one of my wife’s favorite shows, and this is me telephoning some misperception of that process. I get it that it’s easy to criticize.
But what I saw stuck with me the same way James Woods still sticks with his story about seeing the dry run for 9/11. It was as if a really scared guy at the NSA was on the earpiece that Chris Licht normally operates whispering “look down, kill the story, move on quick, OK, we may have gotten away with it”. That same guy probably went to a meeting later and described Joe Scarborough’s inability to have a poker face in these situations a tragedy heretofore known as “the Scarborough situation”
What is the CIA going to do about “the Scarborough situation”
3) In other self serving suppression news, Morning Joe ran with a Politico based repeal health care story today without referencing the new uninsured figure of 59 million Americans. The election last week proves beyond a doubt that left to it’s own devices, the Americans who retain health care or financial wherewithal will act like chapter 7 of ‘Lord Of The Flies” all the way down the decline of our civilization.
The point is best represented by expatriates. I know someone who recently moved to Australia, and Morning Joe had an opportunity to run this Politico story while Chrystia Freeland was on the set. These people know that US healthcare is a giant Ponzi scheme at this point, and that other governments have systems in place that allow them to better compete in the global marketplace via a healthier population.
These expatriates look at what’s going on here and tell you the truth in the first ten minutes of the conversation. But left to our own devices, all of the central points of the Moynihan segment, Joe’s own don’t subscribe to political parties segments, the Jon Stewart segment about where the real conversation should be, are all lost in the wave of Morning Joe’s magic wand. Why say you hate the extremist controlling the argument, when on the same show on the same day, you reinstall the semantic system of demonizing solutions for the good of political control?
It was the same show, it wasn’t some amalgam of some month’s work, it was just today’s show. We are losing ground on health care every day and need a solution. And just like austerity is not a solution, but a dimension to an overall economic plan, you cannot just stick steely knives into solutions to a health care crisis for political gain.
Here is the right way forward. Listen close. Repeal will be a political loser. Get those things you wanted included last time, and make them phase 2 of the big fix. Be a solution seller. Get the state lines situation fixed, the anti trust exemption fixed, and fix the microeconomic incentive in a way that allows the customer to choose services and participate in the cost curve. Trade the mandate for that. Make your free market improvements alongside what Obama got done. But if you’re on the repeal team because ‘elections have consequences’, you’ve got 40, maybe just 20, months to live.
Keep calm and carry on, despite the missiles overhead
That’s all for today, see you tomorrow.
Showing posts with label chrystia freeland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chrystia freeland. Show all posts
Friday, November 12, 2010
Friday, October 8, 2010
A Tunnel To Tragedy
The Hudson River tunnel stoppage is a national tragedy. Rather than rant as I’ve done repeatedly about the Krugman-Keynes versus Republican denial debate, it’s more important to ponder how Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough can have formed a blind alliance with Chris Christie and immediately came down in favor of his work stoppage order. They then went on to cite the travel musings of Chrystia Freeland in Turkey and the second Zbigeniew Brzezinski compare and contrast observation in the last few months, and went further citing Germany’s austerity program, and could not make cohesive sense if their life depended on it.
Germany can afford austerity because its public works is at a rate of completion that it isn’t perpetually 20 years behind in terms of infrastructure maintenance needs like the US is. The two recent foreign travelers are basically saying every day we do things like stop the second Hudson River tunnel the closer we come to having the infrastructure of the third world and having global business look elsewhere.
Freeland and Erin Burnett have made this as clear as they can, but choosing talking points over logic, Morning Joe has pre-aligned itself with the Republican party and cheers any new loss of momentum in governing as some great victory. Freeland and Burnett pointing out the money we would use to make public works happen is beneficial as a whole economy revival and is cheaper now on both a nominal interest basis and a real cost basis than when we had a budget surplus in 1999.
But Morning Joe’s mind is made up and that’s all there is to it. Stop building infrastructure and reverse anything else in the name of austerity. Tragic.
Conveniently the unemployment numbers boost critics either way. The unemployment figures released today were the opposite of the numbers released last month. Last month the nominal jobs lost was better than expected but because more people entered the workforce and looked for work the rate ticked up to 9.6%. The good news caused the uptick but the critics went crazy looking for ways to blame the administration for the rate.
This time the rate was expected to go up to 9.7% for the same positive reasons, but it didn’t, because again we didn’t lose as many jobs as we thought. But now the critics are camped on the fact that because there was a net job loss at all, Obama must be held accountable. It all looks like the analysis of convenience.
In a weird convergence with Yelp.com, Morning Joe just seems to scroll itself to whomever is complaining and cover that. Again you have that future commerce secretary Maria Bartiromo on the show chomping at the bit to show business is ready to revolt because Obama can’t give them the rest of the wealth they haven’t already pilfered.
Objective types continue to fail to break through with rational mathematical reasoning with the Morning Joe cast. In fairness the White House is having the same problems reasoning with people, as we talked about yesterday. But the inability of the show to connect the dots seems intentional.
Germany can afford austerity because its public works is at a rate of completion that it isn’t perpetually 20 years behind in terms of infrastructure maintenance needs like the US is. The two recent foreign travelers are basically saying every day we do things like stop the second Hudson River tunnel the closer we come to having the infrastructure of the third world and having global business look elsewhere.
Freeland and Erin Burnett have made this as clear as they can, but choosing talking points over logic, Morning Joe has pre-aligned itself with the Republican party and cheers any new loss of momentum in governing as some great victory. Freeland and Burnett pointing out the money we would use to make public works happen is beneficial as a whole economy revival and is cheaper now on both a nominal interest basis and a real cost basis than when we had a budget surplus in 1999.
But Morning Joe’s mind is made up and that’s all there is to it. Stop building infrastructure and reverse anything else in the name of austerity. Tragic.
Conveniently the unemployment numbers boost critics either way. The unemployment figures released today were the opposite of the numbers released last month. Last month the nominal jobs lost was better than expected but because more people entered the workforce and looked for work the rate ticked up to 9.6%. The good news caused the uptick but the critics went crazy looking for ways to blame the administration for the rate.
This time the rate was expected to go up to 9.7% for the same positive reasons, but it didn’t, because again we didn’t lose as many jobs as we thought. But now the critics are camped on the fact that because there was a net job loss at all, Obama must be held accountable. It all looks like the analysis of convenience.
In a weird convergence with Yelp.com, Morning Joe just seems to scroll itself to whomever is complaining and cover that. Again you have that future commerce secretary Maria Bartiromo on the show chomping at the bit to show business is ready to revolt because Obama can’t give them the rest of the wealth they haven’t already pilfered.
Objective types continue to fail to break through with rational mathematical reasoning with the Morning Joe cast. In fairness the White House is having the same problems reasoning with people, as we talked about yesterday. But the inability of the show to connect the dots seems intentional.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Free Market Concept Is A Missile Defense Shield For The People Who Stole All The Money In The First Place
The Morning Joe Rebuttal for November 10th, 2009
Observations.
1) What’s not debated enough, and today’s exchange with Chrystia Freeland and Steve Forbes highlighted this, is the economic concept of the public good. There are items that cannot be managed in the nation’s collective best interest by the free market. I for one believe that the Unites States and opponents of health care reform have no business claiming our health care system and the free market have anything to do with one another. But if it’s not a free market and its not nationalized what is it? Its 50 monopolies empowered by anti trust exclusion and a catacomb of government subsidies and legal loopholes designed by the insurers themselves with a common theme. Tell me where you have heard this before?: We will cover the collective health of the United States provided you legally allow us to minimize risk and hand that risk over to the government, while we provide service only where profitable. The US financial system maybe?
If you want to have the free market involved in the health care debate, you have to first put every non market interference, and I mean every single one, on the chopping block, or it’s not a free market. If you want to claim we can’t afford health care reform, you have to explain how we can afford to only pay into a system without receiving a nickel back, as it currently is. I would stand in support of a free market solution if and only if it aims to not just catch up with the free world, but to pass it. There could be an absolutely open market, with transparent costs viewable in completion from the patient through the doctor. No one talks about how there are currently two sets of prices, the negotiated rate a doctor gets from an insurer and what the amount billed to an individual. In my most recent personal case involving the birth of my second child, that amount was $32,000 billed to me as an individual vs. $14,500 paid by my insurer via an “insurer negotiated rate”. We all know that $17,500 difference causes more personal bankruptcies in America than anything else, yet provably its funny money. A free market system would allow all parties to see all rates and choose the right rate in all cases. The chief difference this would make is that it would dismantle important barriers to entry for new insurers at the micro economic level.
Currently, however, the United States is politically incapable of real solutions outside of certain centrist boundaries. We are bound by fear and fringe. The health care reform as it is, is as close as we will come to real change in our lifetimes. The tweaks that happen between now and a senate vote will really just be “get it done” tweaks, but the average citizen will hold out hope that once in place it will revise itself based on empirical real time evidence to a workable national solution with common goals: universal access (not coverage), self sustainability, and improved results, all public goods.
2) The debate over the recruiting practices of the US Military was so 2005 it was laughable. One side says she has proof that the recruiters will manipulate every situation to get more bodies regardless of qualification, the other side says he’s comfortable that recruiters will manipulate every situation to get more bodies in the military regardless of qualification. That’s not a debate, that’s argumentative bluster that adds nothing to the current situation.
Currently, 75% of military age citizens don’t meet qualifications to join the armed forces. Currently one in five Americans are not employed. Those two facts are enough to date the argument we heard today and move the conversation forward to 2009. One concept that has to be out there in second stimulus land is the use of military service to put some segment of America back to work. I believe you can add a non combat segment to the military, complete with commensurate pay grades that accomplishes two goals: lowers the number of non qualified persons by enlisting them to sub-category service while they re-qualify, and lowers the national unemployment figure by taking the bottom end of the market off of the market. It may sound expensive, but were talking stimulus here and if we are cracking on Nancy Pelosi for sausage making in the first stimulus, and there is an understandable whole market effect here, it has to be considered. Or you could just give the entire amount of the first stimulus to Haliburton, but we’ve already tried that.
3) Ed Shulze and Barney Frank wasted everyone’s time twice now and that debate was not newsworthy enough for an MJ appearance. Barney Frank had nothing to say last night, when I watched the exchange in real time, but did that thing that politicians seemingly do with impunity: defended his absolute failure as a legislator with indignation. Look, what being in the center left means to me is pretty conservative financial tendencies, and pretty progressive social tendencies. In the financial markets, I’m more with Dylan Ratigan that there is no sheriff currently and we will wake up sometime soon and face nationalization all over again to reclaim assets that have been removed from public trust and placed in private hands. That sounds like commie-talk I know, but it stems from the inability of anyone in any camp to truly step up and show strong leadership of the free market financial system. Do the math, your money is going to China and Japan at a rate of 100 billion dollars a week right now. When we are taking those loans, what are we buying with the money? We are buying our budget that is 50% consumed by our wars, our financial bailout, which dollar for dollar we will get less than 35% of that money back, and interest on our debts. That 65% unrecouped financial bailout money far exceeds the national defense budget. There are mansions lining Connecticut and Central Park being bought and sold for 65 million dollars apiece while 1 in 5 of us are out of work. The money being poured into the financial system is not being used to fund domestic growth, the workforce benefiting from the solvency of the banking system is Chinese. This can’t go on forever and while this may seem like a run on paragraph, none of this was covered in the banter between Ed Schulze and Barney Frank, displaying little or no concept of what they face.
See you tomorrow, put a webcast of the townhall meeting up.
Observations.
1) What’s not debated enough, and today’s exchange with Chrystia Freeland and Steve Forbes highlighted this, is the economic concept of the public good. There are items that cannot be managed in the nation’s collective best interest by the free market. I for one believe that the Unites States and opponents of health care reform have no business claiming our health care system and the free market have anything to do with one another. But if it’s not a free market and its not nationalized what is it? Its 50 monopolies empowered by anti trust exclusion and a catacomb of government subsidies and legal loopholes designed by the insurers themselves with a common theme. Tell me where you have heard this before?: We will cover the collective health of the United States provided you legally allow us to minimize risk and hand that risk over to the government, while we provide service only where profitable. The US financial system maybe?
If you want to have the free market involved in the health care debate, you have to first put every non market interference, and I mean every single one, on the chopping block, or it’s not a free market. If you want to claim we can’t afford health care reform, you have to explain how we can afford to only pay into a system without receiving a nickel back, as it currently is. I would stand in support of a free market solution if and only if it aims to not just catch up with the free world, but to pass it. There could be an absolutely open market, with transparent costs viewable in completion from the patient through the doctor. No one talks about how there are currently two sets of prices, the negotiated rate a doctor gets from an insurer and what the amount billed to an individual. In my most recent personal case involving the birth of my second child, that amount was $32,000 billed to me as an individual vs. $14,500 paid by my insurer via an “insurer negotiated rate”. We all know that $17,500 difference causes more personal bankruptcies in America than anything else, yet provably its funny money. A free market system would allow all parties to see all rates and choose the right rate in all cases. The chief difference this would make is that it would dismantle important barriers to entry for new insurers at the micro economic level.
Currently, however, the United States is politically incapable of real solutions outside of certain centrist boundaries. We are bound by fear and fringe. The health care reform as it is, is as close as we will come to real change in our lifetimes. The tweaks that happen between now and a senate vote will really just be “get it done” tweaks, but the average citizen will hold out hope that once in place it will revise itself based on empirical real time evidence to a workable national solution with common goals: universal access (not coverage), self sustainability, and improved results, all public goods.
2) The debate over the recruiting practices of the US Military was so 2005 it was laughable. One side says she has proof that the recruiters will manipulate every situation to get more bodies regardless of qualification, the other side says he’s comfortable that recruiters will manipulate every situation to get more bodies in the military regardless of qualification. That’s not a debate, that’s argumentative bluster that adds nothing to the current situation.
Currently, 75% of military age citizens don’t meet qualifications to join the armed forces. Currently one in five Americans are not employed. Those two facts are enough to date the argument we heard today and move the conversation forward to 2009. One concept that has to be out there in second stimulus land is the use of military service to put some segment of America back to work. I believe you can add a non combat segment to the military, complete with commensurate pay grades that accomplishes two goals: lowers the number of non qualified persons by enlisting them to sub-category service while they re-qualify, and lowers the national unemployment figure by taking the bottom end of the market off of the market. It may sound expensive, but were talking stimulus here and if we are cracking on Nancy Pelosi for sausage making in the first stimulus, and there is an understandable whole market effect here, it has to be considered. Or you could just give the entire amount of the first stimulus to Haliburton, but we’ve already tried that.
3) Ed Shulze and Barney Frank wasted everyone’s time twice now and that debate was not newsworthy enough for an MJ appearance. Barney Frank had nothing to say last night, when I watched the exchange in real time, but did that thing that politicians seemingly do with impunity: defended his absolute failure as a legislator with indignation. Look, what being in the center left means to me is pretty conservative financial tendencies, and pretty progressive social tendencies. In the financial markets, I’m more with Dylan Ratigan that there is no sheriff currently and we will wake up sometime soon and face nationalization all over again to reclaim assets that have been removed from public trust and placed in private hands. That sounds like commie-talk I know, but it stems from the inability of anyone in any camp to truly step up and show strong leadership of the free market financial system. Do the math, your money is going to China and Japan at a rate of 100 billion dollars a week right now. When we are taking those loans, what are we buying with the money? We are buying our budget that is 50% consumed by our wars, our financial bailout, which dollar for dollar we will get less than 35% of that money back, and interest on our debts. That 65% unrecouped financial bailout money far exceeds the national defense budget. There are mansions lining Connecticut and Central Park being bought and sold for 65 million dollars apiece while 1 in 5 of us are out of work. The money being poured into the financial system is not being used to fund domestic growth, the workforce benefiting from the solvency of the banking system is Chinese. This can’t go on forever and while this may seem like a run on paragraph, none of this was covered in the banter between Ed Schulze and Barney Frank, displaying little or no concept of what they face.
See you tomorrow, put a webcast of the townhall meeting up.
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