tdog

To paraphrase the late great Mahatma Gandhi, my view on free market capitalism in the United States is that I think it would be an excellent idea (instead of the rigged and crony “capitalims” we “enjoy” now.) Case in point: CNBC reports that the 500 largest U.S. corporations are sitting on a record $800 billion in cash and cash equivalents and they just won’t hire, even as they literally earn zero or negative real returns on their cash. Some groups of shareholders are pressing for increased dividends so that they at least can make use of the cash, if corporate...

This Slate piece by Dahlia Lithwick pretty much sums up my own feelings towards the Supreme Court’s (5-4… surprise, surprise) decision in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, in which it, quite literally, ruled that Wal-Mart was just too darned big to sue- just the sheer size of the entity and the vast numbers of individual store managers making independent store decisions all of which just magically ended up discriminating against women– was sufficient to justify continuing a practice that has resulted in over 2/3 of the behemoth’s employees being women, but less than 1/3 of managers. Discrimination, you say? Pish posh...

L’Affaire Weiner seemingly comes to an end, thereby requiring the American media to run around to find another excuse not to cover the impending Greek default, the fallout of which may now have led to massive fallout in Italy and Spain… ignore the tagline of this post [“the war between liberals and conservatives is a false divide and conquer dog and pony show”] at your extreme peril. Yes, as I walked through the streets of Brooklyn to retrieve my week’s produce share from my local CSA this morning (food security first, boys and girls… that reminds me… I need to...

We’ll “jump off” with this hit-piece on Governor Rick Perry (R-TX), the “R” seemingly for “religious nut” as Perry once again invites other governors to a revival meeting with a gay-bashing group. The Think Progress piece notes occasions where Perry riffs on the Old Testament (apparently the Pharaoh’s Dream story) and otherwise suggest that current economic misery is “God’s plan” and the rest of us shouldn’t be too dependent on the government (and he’s doing his part by trying to slash Texas’s) and of course, misery lets us be “closer to God” or “God’s plan” or thereabouts. Well then. I...

I’m going to leave it to the readers (those few, if any, I have left) to try to come up with a “rational world” solution to the problem raised by Ron Brownstein in this observant piece noting that younger workers can’t get their careers started… and older ones can’t get theirs ended! Obviously, I’m going to suggest my own below. Spoiler alert: it involves not taxing the rich and increasing the Pentagon budget… The obvious usual response that not American rational societies have come up with is a variety of things Americans have come to call “socialism” (a term which...

In the legal career I spend much of my life-energy exchanging for money, one of my (all-too-numerous) pet-expressions is “I can defend against clever and dishonest. I can defend against evil. I can even defend against crazy. But neither I, nor anyone, can defend against stupid.” And this, boys and girls, is why I am so bearish on our collective future as Americans (though, as individuals, if you and I watch out for ourselves and ignore the idiocy of those around us, we might just make it through). Case in point: the endless Anthony “Eponymous” Weiner story. Congressman Weiner is...

Well, well… former President Bill Clinton is now walking back his earlier remarks that a Congressional failure to enlarge the (over $14 trillion) federal debt ceiling by another trillion or two “wouldn’t be so calamitous.” As is necessary in the Alice-in-Wonderland faux reality that now passes for reality, we’ll forget that what the man who gave us “depends on what the meaning of is is” was actually making an accurate statement, to wit, what matters is not the technical default itself, but whether the world’s credit markets believe it really matters… Bill Clinton knows God damned well that his remarks...

Just keep moving along… I admit I raised an eyebrow when I first heard the suggestion that the President may have made some dramatically new pronouncements with respect to a purported overall settlement between Israel and its Palestinian houseguests, but Jeffrey Goldberg writing in Atlantic correctly observes that the basic policy is… unchanged from prior understood policy. Indeed, this piece by Aluf Benn in Haaretz observes that Obama actually handed Netanyahu a major diplomatic victory, rather than any kind of snub to Israel (whose leader visits the White House today). The reason is that while many sound-bite fed Americans will...

Nothing to see here… just a bunch of elderly Midwestern folks getting mace in the face because they had the audacity to protest J.P. Morgan Chase and its foreclosure policies (in Columbus, OH). It wasn’t just Glenn Beck who called an organizer of a protest based on withholding of mortgage payments an “economic terrorist”– the authorities would characterize any activity threatening the bottom lines of our beloved financial institutions (and the bonuses of their beloved executives) to be, well, terrorism. Naturally, this is why right-wing groups likely to threaten people, be they members of minority groups, gays, or even politicians,...

This Grey Lady Op Ed suggests that not merely college grads, or even Americans, but 80% of humanity is “irrationally exuberant,” or “optimistic” about their own personal prospects, despite significant evidence to the contrary. The highly simplistic article assumes that uniquely American acts of stupidity (such as profligate spending, short-term thinking and refusal to take basic lifestyle precautions) are the result of “optimism” rather than… stupidity… and hence, misses the mark (just saying)… it also overlooks the fact that the happiest people on Earth according to surveys– the Danes– do not seem so optimistic, and are so happy precisely because...