j_b

I didn't say anything about drugs, I only remarked that Friedmanomics accomplished the exact opposite of what it claimed to do, like much of free market fundamentalism. There isn't an economic sector where consolidation into oligopolies and huge entry costs aren't the rule since Friedman's economics theories became predominant. There is a big difference between fair trade and protectionism but I don't expect you to acknowledge it.

THe SS trust fund isn't part of the general fund or a ponzi scheme, no matter how many times you wish to regurgitate conservative anti-social programs propaganda. It's not because politicians regularly steal from the SS trust fund to pay for their wars that we have to make the same mistake of confusing general fund and SS trust fund that is paid for by working people. And you didn't address the fact that your pie chart didn't identify financing for past wars into military expenditures.

Robert Rubin Returns by Eamons Javers Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin - who watched his reputation as an economic titan shattered after leaving the Clinton White House - is decidedly out of favor in the nation's capital. Except one place - the Obama administration. Behind the scenes, Rubin still wields enormous influence in Barack Obama's Washington, chatting regularly with a legion of former employees who dominate the ranks of the young administration's policy team. He speaks regularly to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, who once worked for Rubin at Treasury. According to Geithner's public calendar, the Treasury Secretary spoke or met with Rubin at least four times in the first six months of Geithner's tenure. Three of those chats, including an hour-long session in Rubin's New York office, came before President Obama released his Wall Street regulatory reform proposal in June of 2009. Rubin's is a discreet kind of influence, though, because the veteran Wall Street hand is still dealing with the fallout from his post-White House career. He took a job at Citigroup, where the bank's collapse was averted only by the injection of $45 billion in taxpayer bailout cash. [..] The long list of Rubin acolytes working for Obama includes National Economic Council Director Larry Summers, Geithner counselor Gene Sperling, Budget Director Peter Orszag, deputy assistant to the president Michael Froman (who worked with Rubin at Treasury and at Citigroup), National Economic Council official Jason Furman, Deputy National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, and Gary Gensler, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers and many of the other officials also get regular phone calls from Rubin. Also, many of the basic assumptions underlying Obama's approach to the economy can be traced to Rubin's ideas about the way capitalism should work, say former colleagues. Although Obama's team faces very different economic circumstances than Rubin did at Treasury, "the basic philosophy of free market liberalism is still there," said Alice Rivlin, who worked with Rubin when she ran Bill Clinton's Office of Management and Budget. "If I were running things again, I would certainly want to know what Bob Rubin thought," Rivlin said. "I wouldn't necessarily do it, but I'd want to know what he thought." Rubin's critics say they see his fingerprints on proposals in Obama's regulatory reform proposal. Obama would force derivatives trades onto a public exchange -- but still leave Wall Street free to keep "non-standard" trades hidden from public view. And critics complain that the administration's resistance to calls to break up the too-big-to-fail banks is classic Rubin. Rubin declined to comment. Rubin's tattered reputation is a far cry from where it stood a decade ago, when Rubin, then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and then-Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers appeared in an iconic image on the cover of Time magazine after the successful bailout of the Mexican economy under the headline "The Committee to Save the World." Greenspan testified Wednesday before the crisis committee, saying he was right 70 percent of the time during his 21 years in public service. That's a humbling admission from the man once lauded in a book by Bob Woodward called "Maestro." Rubin's record, too, has been tarnished to the point that it raised eyebrows inside the Obama administration when CFTC chief Gary Gensler invoked Rubin's name in a recent interview. "What's so marvelous about Bob," Gensler told the New York Times in March, was that "he fostered in people the ability to think. He wanted to hear differing ideas." That's not something many others will say out loud. Gensler "was one of the few people willing to go on the record saying he likes Bob Rubin," said the senior administration official. "But privately, there's still a huge amount of respect for Rubin's thinking." The mere mention of Rubin's name invokes cringes on the political left - where "Rubinomics" is derided as an approach that coddles Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. "This is the guy whose policies basically allowed Wall Street to play Russian Roulette with our future, and now millions of Americans are out of work as a result," said Daniel Pedrotty, director of the AFL-CIO's office of investment. "He took his money and fled the scene of the crime." [..] http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/08-0

As if Friedman's ideology meant fewer economic monopolies. 30+ years of friedmanomics have made it much difficult to open a local hardware store and compete against the giants than taking on the drug cartel.

Except that your pie chart is highly misleading because it includes trust funds like SS within the general fund and the expenses of past military spending are not distinguished from nonmilitary spending. Where your income tax money really goes: Total Outlays (Federal Funds): $2,650 billion MILITARY: 54% and $1,449 billion NON-MILITARY: 46% and $1,210 billion http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

[video:youtube]SgFlJjnULh0 part 2: part 3: part 4: part 5:

The Bush administration was far to the right, which explains the hyperbolas and a good deal of truth from some left wingers. The Obama administration is center right, which doesn't explain at all the loony rhetoric of the right wing.

As if greed and widespread tax evasion hadn't recently proven to be a powerful enough incentive to crash the world's economy, little less that of puny Greece. As I said before, there is no Greek population growth issue that immigration couldn't fix.

Ha! you are fabulating again. I never said their financial problems weren't real or that their social model was unique. Greece's main problem is having a disproportionate amount of their economy in the black market and adopting a perpetual growth model that is clearly fantasy.

THe sosholists have it their way

We may never run out of oil because it'll be too expensive. As of 1998: "This report by the International Center for Technology Assessment (CTA) identifies and quantifies the many external costs of using motor vehicles and the internal combustion engine that are not reflected in the retail price Americans pay for gasoline. These are costs that consumers pay indirectly by way of increased taxes, insurance costs, and retail prices in other sectors. The report divides the external costs of gasoline usage into five primary areas: (1) Tax Subsidization of the Oil Industry; (2) Government Program Subsidies; (3) Protection Costs Involved in Oil Shipment and Motor Vehicle Services; (4) Environmental, Health, and Social Costs of Gasoline Usage; and (5) Other Important Externalities of Motor Vehicle Use. Together, these external costs total $558.7 billion to $1.69 trillion per year, which, when added to the retail price of gasoline, results in a per gallon price of $5.60 to $15.14." The Real Price of Gas

It's quite typical to hear conservatives claim that environmentalists or scientists are chicken little who have been caught red handed multiple times making false alarmist predictions. I suspect it's typical to hear such claims because they are regular talking points spewed by dead-ender anti-environmental think tanks like CATO, AEI, Heritage, etc For example, we always hear how the Club of Rome in 1972 had it all wrong because it supposedly predicted "we'd run out of oil by 1992" or it predicted "the end of the world by the end of the 20th century". In fact, not only did Limits to Growth and the Club of Rome not predict any such thing things but the main conclusions from the business as usual scenario considered by Limits to Growth compare favorably with real data for the period 1970-2000 that tend to argue for a system collapse by mid-21st century.

It's rather astonishing how the IPCC publishes a 3000 page long document containing 10,000's of facts, and denialists keep citing the one error that was found (not even in the scientific part of the report) as if it invalidated 30 years of science. I suspect it gives us an idea of the lack of substance behind denialism.

Cue up the carbon tax mantra. whether you want to cue it up or not, you are still paying twice the pump price you used to pay less than decade ago, so spare us the anti-tax demagoguery.

the dollar didn't fluctuate by 7 times its value. How could anyone claim there isn't an energy crisis after we spent $3 trillion we didn't have and killed 100's of thousands just to keep the spigot wide open a little longer?

a plot that I can hopefully hot-link to make my point:

A barrel of oil was 7 times more expensive in 2008 than in 2003. Prices have come down only because demand relented during the recession, but they are alredy back up to $70/barrel. It's the end of cheap oil and we better get used to it.

The oil barrel price is back up to $70 while demand hasn't increased because of the recession. As I said we are running out of cheap oil that fuels our entire economy from transportation to agriculture.

I guess you didn't make clear who said exactly what but lo and behold it's 2010 and we have a full blown energy crisis on our hands because we are running out of cheap oil.

If we lose the oysters, civilization as we know it goes down the drain. For sure. what about an oyster forum before they are gone?

[video:youtube]g3hBYTkI-sE

The Last Oyster Haul? by Brendan Smith Thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, it's looking like my days as a commercial fisherman are numbered. I've been working the sea on-and-off my whole life. At 15 years old I quit high school to work the lobster boats out of Lynn, MA; later I fished cod and crab boats on the Bering Sea. As over-fishing decimated the cod stocks, I headed back home to Newfoundland to try my hand as a fish farmer growing halibut and salmon. Now I'm an oyster man, growing 100,000 organic oysters a year on a 40-acre plot in the Long Island Sound. I see myself as a new breed of green fisherman, who have shifted from hunter-gatherers trolling the seas in search of declining fish stocks, to ocean-based farmers, sustainably growing shellfish on small plots of ocean acreage for local markets. (Oysters rank as one of the top "super green seafoods" by the Environmental Defense Fund.) But now, just as I've regained my green sea legs, scientists tell me that in the coming decades I won't be able to make a living growing oysters anymore. They tell me greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are turning the oceans acidic, and oysters, already fickle little creatures, are likely to be the first victims. Here's how the marine biologists tell me the process works: Oceans absorb about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases from human activities. The problem is that too much CO2 absorption also raises water's acidity. Increased acidity reduces carbonate -- the mineral used to form the shells and skeletons of many shellfish and corals. The effect is akin to osteoporosis, slowing growth and making shells weaker. If pH levels drop enough, the shells will literally dissolve. The acidification of the ocean today is larger and faster than anything scientists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. According to a recent study in the journal Natural Geoscience, current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass marine extinction 55 million years ago. Oysters and other shellfish are expected to be some of the first victims of ocean acidification. Researchers at Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences found that even minor increases in ocean acidity have significant, detrimental effects on the growth, development and survival of hard clams, bay scallops and oysters. Scientists already suspect that acidic water is responsible for killing several billion oyster, clam and mussel larvae that were being raised at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on the Oregon coast in the summer of 2008. But it's not just my oysters and livelihood that are imperiled. Shellfish and other vulnerable species function as crucial links for entire ecosystems in the ocean. According to the NRDC: The new chemical composition of our oceans is expected to harm a wide range of ocean life. The resulting disruption to the ocean ecosystem could have a widespread ripple effect and further deplete already struggling fisheries worldwide... A more acidic ocean could wipe out species, disrupt the food web and impact fishing, tourism and any other human endeavor that relies on the sea. Commercial fishermen have conflicted hearts. We're famously independent, often wary of government regulation. We have traditionally had a complex, often combative relationship with the environmental movement. But at the same time, we also have a deep respect and love for the sea. Our lives, our livelihoods, are held at the mercy of natural forces more than almost any other occupation. Politicians try to cast workers as not caring about protecting ocean resources and the perilous effects of greenhouse gases. They say the coming crisis is too far off and we're more fearful about environmental policy destroying jobs. Exactly the opposite. Protecting my life and livelihood requires protecting the oceans and planet. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/04/08-1

[video:youtube]tIdIqbv7SPo

Obama's Second Chance on the Predominant Moral Issue of This Century by Dr. James Hansen President Obama, finally, took a get-involved get-tough approach to negotiations on health care legislation and the arms control treaty with Russia -- with success. Could this be the turn-around for what might still be a great presidency? The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet. Yet the president, addressing climate in the State of the Union, was at his good-guy worst, leading with "I know that there are those who disagree..." with the scientific evidence. This weak entrée, almost legitimizing denialists, was predictably greeted by cheers and hoots from well-oiled coal-fired Congressmen. The president was embarrassed and his supporters cringed. This is not the 17th century, when "beliefs" trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system. The president should unequivocally support the climate science community, which is under politically orchestrated assault on the legitimacy of its scientific assessments. If he needs reassurance or cover, the president can ask for a prompt report from the National Academy of Sciences, established by Abraham Lincoln for advice on technical issues. Why face the difficult truth presented by the climate science? Why not use the president's tack: just talk about the need for clean energy and energy independence? Because that approach leads to wrong policies, ineffectual legislation larded with giveaways to special interests, such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House and the bills being considered now in the Senate. The fundamental requirement for solving our fossil fuel addiction and moving to a clean energy future is a rising price on carbon emissions. Otherwise, if we refuse to make fossil fuels pay for their damage to human health, the environment, and our children's future, fossil fuels will remain the cheapest energy and we will squeeze every drop from tar sands, oil shale, pristine lands, and offshore areas. An essential corollary to the rising carbon price is 100 percent redistribution of collected fees to the public -- otherwise the public will never allow the fee to be high enough to affect lifestyles and energy choices. The fee must be collected from fossil fuel companies across-the-board at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Revenues should be divided equally among all legal adult residents, with half-shares for children up to two per family, distributed monthly as a "green check". Part of the revenue could be used to reduce taxes, provided the tax reduction is transparent and verifiable. The rising carbon price will affect almost everything. People's purchases will reflect a desire to minimize their costs. Food from nearby farms will benefit; imports from halfway around the world will decline. Renewable energies, other carbon-free energies, and energy efficiency will grow; fossil fuels will decline. The fee-and-green-check approach is transparent, fair and effective. Congressman John Larson defined an appropriate rising fee. $15 per ton of carbon dioxide the first year and $10 more per ton each year. Economic modeling shows that carbon emissions would decline 30 percent by 2020. The annual dividend then would be $2000-3000 per legal adult resident, $6000-9000 per family with two or more children. About sixty percent of the public would receive more in the green check than they pay in added energy costs. People will set their net cost or gain via their energy and other consumer choices. Dividends could be adjusted state-by-state to prevent transfer of wealth from one part of the country to another. Religions across the spectrum -- Catholics, Jews, Mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals -- are united in seeing climate change as a moral and ethical challenge. The Religious Coalition on Creation Care is working with the Citizen's Climate Lobby, the Price Carbon Campaign, and economists at the Carbon Tax Center to help promote this honest and effective energy and climate policy. The public, if well-informed, can be expected to support this policy. But so far Congress has been steamrolled by special interests. Congressional leaders add giveaways in their bills to attract industry support and specific votes. The best of the lot, the Cantwell-Collins bill, returns 75 percent of the revenue to the public. But it is still a cap-and-trade scheme, and its low carbon price and offset-type projects create little incentive for clean energy and would have only small impact on carbon emissions. Can the cacophony of special interests be overcome? There is one way: the president must get involved. He must explain the situation to the public and use his bully pulpit to persuade Congress to do what is right for the nation and future generations. He must explain that a rising carbon price is needed to phase out our fossil fuel addiction. The dividend will provide the public the means to move to a clean energy future, stimulating the economy. Carbon fee and dividend is the base policy needed to move the nation forward to a clean energy future. It must be supplemented by other actions including building and efficiency standards, and public investment in improved infrastructure and technology development. Congress has a role to play toward these ends, but it is the rising carbon price will make them feasible. Investment decisions are best left to the private sector. The government can provide loan guarantees for nuclear power and support development of trial carbon capture storage, but these energies must compete with energy efficiency and renewable energies in a free market. The best part about a simple honest rising carbon price is that it provides the only realistic chance for an international climate accord. President Obama was right to abandon the 192-nation debate. The need is for an agreement between the two dominant emitters: the United States and China. China will never agree to the "cap" approach that Congress favors. Developing nations will not cap their economies. But China is willing to negotiate a carbon price. How can I say that with confidence? China is making enormous investments in nuclear power, wind power, and solar power. They want to avoid the fossil fuel addiction of the United States. They want to clean up their atmosphere and water. They want to protect the several hundred million Chinese living near sea level. They know that their clean fuels will win out only if fossil fuels are made to pay for damages that they cause. Once the United States and China agree on a carbon price, most other nations will accept the same. Products made by nations that do not have a carbon price can be charged an equivalent duty under existing rules of the World Trade Organization. That will convince most nations to join, so they can collect the tax themselves. Perhaps posterity may remember that Obama reduced the number of nuclear-tipped missiles, or that he added ten percent of Americans to the health care roles. But if he dreams of being a great president, he needs to take on the great moral challenge of our century. http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/05-7

Right, it only took a century for the "free market" to acknowledge the dangers of asbestos, half as long for tobacco, etc .. The "free hand" still manages to finance the necessary propaganda to sway public opinion. Isn't self-regulation of the "free market", wonderful?