Sunday, April 15, 2007

911

deficits

ONE POOR MAN’S VIEW OF DEFICIT SPENDING

In my last post I displayed part of a mass email sent to my inbox from Human Events, authored by Newt Gingrich; where I answered his questions and sent it back to him.

I now move on to deficit spending. I am no economist; but I think that’s somewhat in my favor in developing my analysis.

I view the deficit spending begun by Reagan as a ruthless plan to recolonize the US. Neither party was without guilt, as Democrats acquiesced to a legislative agenda of cutting tax on the on the wealthy, purposely shrinking government revenues and simultaneously rocketing military spending to the outer limits.

However smart Reagan was, and I believe he was a man who knew his own mind; the plan for the 80’s “revolution” was hatched by the billionaires who spotted him the cash needed to dominate the media, as never before…and has always been since.

Deficit spending is not the same as a household going in debt; yet corporation mass media uses that model ubiquitously. The debt of the US consists in issuing bonds instead of taxing those able to pay. The real cheating comes from the fact that all those bigshots who got a break on taxes, put their money in bonds; so instead of just paying less tax; they are earning a profit from the ones who do pay taxes.

If Nixon was paranoid, dark and brooding; Reagan raised hate mongering to an artful new plateau; using transparent code words to promulgate an anti-minority and anti-poor policy that has been copied with success by a number of lesser minions of the right; Gingrich, Graham, DeLay, Gov. Engler of Michigan, to name a few. They all paint the same picture, that the problems of the poor are due to their sorriness, and ridding the treasury of any social program burden would be the balast to set the economy high in the water; alas, tis not so.

While Bill Clinton was a talented executive; the compromises he made with the Repubican dominated Congress after the “Contract on America” swept so many neo-cons into office in 1994; on a tsunami of special interest money, and the proven formula of appealing to the basest impulses of voters, milking the resentment of wage earners striving inch by inch higher in the strata; seeking a milieau that is concrete proof of superiority; the easily seduced hatred, for all those without means receiving anything from the public weal. All the code: welfare queen; cycle of dependency; criminal element; the need for law and order…has enriched those who, straddled atop the corporate ziggurat, cannot be quenched by any amount of accumulation; whose greed is the ring of fire that presents us our ghastly current events and entertainments.

Do not believe for an instant Reagan was stacking the court to end abortion on demand; the whole abortion patronage paid for with mere words is more code from both directions. Reagan was in Hollywood long enough to know that clean abortions have been available for a price since the adolescence of the scientific method. He knew his Bible too: “There is nothing new under the sun…” –King Solomon, in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The “Kitchen Cabinet,” Reagan’s billionaire supporters (which featured that over-80 paragon of virtue, retailing mogul Sidney Blumenthal, who would die in the arms of a not much more than nubile prostitute) had measured the timing and range, like so many artillery spotters; to put on the high court just those who would render a decision that was an economic coup de’ tat to wit:

U.S. Supreme Court

CARGILL, INC. v. MONFORT OF COLORADO, INC., 479 U.S. 104 (1986)

479 U.S. 104

CARGILL, INC., ET AL. v. MONFORT OF COLORADO, INC. CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT No. 85-473. Argued October 6, 1986 Decided December 9, 1986

Held:

1. A private plaintiff seeking injunctive relief under 16 must show a threat of injury "of the type the antitrust laws were designed to prevent and that flows from that which makes defendants' acts unlawful." Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., 429 U.S. 477, 489 . Pp. 109-113.

2. The proposed merger does not constitute a threat of antitrust injury. A showing, as in this case, of loss or damage due merely to increased competition does not constitute such injury. And while predatory pricing is capable of inflicting antitrust injury, here respondent neither raised nor proved any claim of predatory pricing before the District Court, and thus the Court of Appeals erred in interpreting respondent's allegations as equivalent to allegations of injury from predatory conduct. Pp. 113-119.

3. This Court, however, will not adopt in effect a per se rule denying competitors standing to challenge acquisitions on the basis of [479 U.S. 104, 105] predatory-pricing theories. Nothing in the Clayton Act's language or legislative history suggests that Congress intended this Court to ignore injuries caused by such anticompetitive practices as predatory pricing. Pp. 120-122.

761 F.2d 570, reversed and remanded.

BRENNAN, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., and MARSHALL, POWELL, O'CONNOR, and SCALIA, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which WHITE, J., joined, post, p. 122. BLACKMUN, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

This case is obscure as hell; but has affected more Americans than Roe and Miranda combined. For it stood antitrust law on its head-and paved the way for the big-fish-eating-the-smaller-fish merger orgy that has sliced through the business community in the generation since it was handed down.

You can find the case on http://www.findlaw.com and read it free; I’ve included the citation, just click on the “for legal professionals” version (at the top of the page-you don’t want “for the public” that’s just lawyer ads) then search Supreme Court cases.

But you don’t have to be an MBA to get the jist only reading the holdings above.

More to come.

Then:

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

IMUS

I have watched "Imus in the Morning," on MSNBC for at least five years on a semi regular basis. Don Imus has been suspended by the cable channel and his radio station WFAN, for two weeks commencing the 16th. He is hosting his "radiothon", which starts the 12th. This yearly effort raises money for, Tomorrows Children’s Fund, the CJ Foundation for SIDS, and the Imus Ranch for kids with cancer. Since its inception in 1990, the radiothon has raised more than $50 million for very worthy causes. The I-Man carries himself as an independent rebel and iconoclast. He made his mark in radio with years of toil honing and polishing his no-holds-barred style, which a sizable throng consider provocative and arresting. There is a twin multitude who would call the show irksome and tedious, a daily festival of eclectic country music snippets blended with the kind of dissing and ridiculing that goes on at worksites across America. Imus calls it a comedy show. Redneck observations abound. So does mimickry of percieved black speech idiom, especially by Bernard, the producer, who has an open mike in his booth. In the months following Katrina, Bernard had frequent turns at mocking New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin; using words such as "ax" instead of ask; reprising Nagin's "chocolate people" statement and riffing on it, citing "mocha people" to the unfailing hilarity of Don Imus. All white people know such humor abounds in many white settings, where quite commonly the same white people treat any black person, face to face, with the same courtesy and manners as white people, in public as society expects. Maybe Imus falls into this category. A lot of white people do. It seems unfair to condemn so many as racist or hypocrites. I say much of this [childish] behavior stems from our continued racial apartness. The American experience is at least a dichotomy, with blacks and whites living contrasting realities with vastly differant experiences and expectations (Who is conditioned to anticipate that police will surely hassle them whenever they move about where the surrounding backdrop of people doesn't conceal them). I am from the Detroit area, and lived in the city after I finished high school in a suburb, Southfield. My parents moved into a home in Livonia, a 36 square mile city 2 miles west of the Detroit city limits. My Father was employed by the largest Cadillac dealer in the US, in volume of sales, Donald Massey Cadillac, and met many people from the western suburbs. He heard the Livonia Police were using a pretty lame code over the police radio: NIL, as in, "I've got a NIL heading west on 7 Mile approaching Inkster..." One guess to ID what "in Livonia" they were referring to. The police band is available to the public, so it was not long before they were on the TV news being verbally flogged for racism; and bringing attention to 97% white Livonia. When the neo-cons were calling for school "vouchers", a gainsaying label for a tax refund if his kid goes to private school, I had to think back to a Detroit Free Press article I read in the late 80's, documented with state generated figures. How corrupt our language and system have become! What damage! The TV commercial politics and the monstrously arduous and wasteful travel the current primary/caucus "election" regimen obliges, has winnowed the choice for President, but not to narrow it down to the qualified. Instead the process furnishes candidates equipped with the money, pollsters and logistic teams to capture Iowan votes first, so fundraising will spike, enhancing the opportunity to prevail in subsequent state polls. These primaries as they have developed select and send delegates to the national convention who have no choice how to vote. The free exercise of conscience departs on primary day and does not return until November when the 50% or so Americans who vote get a choice of one or the other. The reverse engineered Iowa Caucus that appeared in the 1970's merely on the whim to supplant New Hampshire as the first object of attention. A caucus differs from a primary, the campaign does not consist of wooing the public at large, small, far flung assemblies throughout the state vote in parliamentary fashion. Iowa requires face to face contact with candidates in these little gatherings to perform well enough to proceed into the log jam of plebiscites that immediately follow, with anything approaching a winner's chance. This traversing of the state of Iowa does nothing to elevate the public debate or refine the issues of a national election. And the cash needed to appease Iowans In Detroit, where I grew up, public schools received state and federal aid at a set amount per student statewide. By a very wide margin the bulk of funds for each local school district come from the residents of each individual district based upon the assessed value of his real property. So kids in suburban West Bloomfield a scant 4.5 miles from the Detroit City Limits were educated with over $7,000.00 per pupil for the academic year; while Detroit Public Schools had to make do with less than $2000.00 for each student. So what we call public schools are are a variable mish mash of schools based on what the parents can afford. And since 1980, political victory has engineered by professional thought manipulators, not with catchy slogans, but by appealing to the fears and resentments easily stirred in a public, where so many households are with the loss of the next five or six paychecks, facing ruin and homelessness. It is this economic reality that causes the abrading between races. Numbers don't lie. The per capita incomes of the racial groups remains staggered with whites earning more; and providing their offspring with the superior education money provides. The defensive stance adopted by Imus in the wake of the story exploding in the media after his suspension was announced; citing his good works, his overall positive relations with the African American community, the sincerity of his apology and remorse; demonstrated a lack of insight as to what the uproar was about. The National Broadcast Company was historically about the closest thing we have had to a "BBC", PBS was late and too weak. NBC was so big, in the thirties, with its NBC Red and NBC Blue, providing mutually exclusive programming, the government force NBC to divest itself of "Blue" which became the independant American Broadcasting Company, ABC. Along with Columbia Broadcasting System, these companies were the public voice and in spite of ratings losses The so-called "simulcast" of his WFAN program on MSNBC disappeared years ago. The "simulcast" is now reversed. When viewers tune in on cable, they see the show originating from the million dollar opulence of a sleek, space-age MSNBC studio. If he is in the city, he is seated in in Ft. Lee, NJ, when his workday begins, several miles by limo (his mode of transit-he routinely reminds his audience and costars from the mike) from the old radio booth. The non-devotee, unlearned in I-Man lore identifies him as a TV star. A TV star having a powerful platform and wearing whatever mantle of legitimacy that NBC News has earned or conveys, which is not a small thing.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

The baseball season has again begun. I for one will view it sporatically because I know the greed has despoiled it. Greed is in all; and it is sad, but I think true-that the greed exhibited in our spectator sports has become an emblem of the lowering of American standards of excellence. All World Series games played at night. We would have a better-truer competitive result if games were played in TV studio conditions and released for air-play later. Night games are the bane of good baseball. While all the sports world condemns Barry Bonds for his use of performance enhancing drugs; no one steps up to remind the public that greenies-(benzedrine)-were a common locker accessory of the 50's and 60's. Even Willie Mays used them. The need of perfect eyesight and an amazing strength and speed of wrists to hit the major league pitch cannot be questioned. No amount of doping will enhance this. So whether we choose to reduce the public acceptance of barry bonds achievements depends on whether anyone knows a thing about baseball and a game of inches.