It’s done. The House and the Senate approved the final version of the stimulus bill, and it’s off to the White House. President Obama is going to sign it into law on Tuesday, in my stomping grounds, Denver, CO, in the Museum of Nature and Science.
I’ve been wanting to do a postmortem on this first big piece of legislation that came since President Obama took office. Let’s first take a look at some problems with the bill itself.
OK, if we take the version of the Great Depression currently being shilled by Mitch McConnell and company, let’s look through it a bit.
FDR and the Democrats came up with the New Deal and engaged in Government Spending (TM) to build dams, roads, various types of infrastructure and so on to get people working.
But Government Spending doesn’t work!!! They languished in the Great Depression until the end of the ’30s. (Let’s ignore those inconvenient graphs of employment rates and GDP and such that disprove this.)
See, what really got us out of the Great Depression was World War II. See, the whole nation got together, sent soldiers and such overseas, and we built a whole bunch of guns, bullets, bombs, airplanes, tanks, ships, food, supplies, etc. etc. etc. so we could blow our enemies to tiny bits more efficiently.
How did we pay for all those soldiers and weapons and supplies and such so we could blow Bad Guys to smithereens?
Oh yeah, GOVERNMENT SPENDING!
But I thought government spending didn’t work…
Free trade? What kind of free do you mean? In the Open Source world, when people are talking about what the term “free software” means, a well-informed geek will tell you about the distinction between free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-speech. Head over to http://www.linuxmint.com/ and you can download a complete Linux system with the OS kernel, a GUI environment, an office suite, web browser, development tools, games, etc. etc. etc. for zero cost. What’s more important to me is that Linux is free as in speech as well, and that’s a big reason why I’m such a huge fan. The Linux kernel, as well as most of the software you see on Linux systems, are made available under an open source license. You get access to the “secret sauce” source code, you can hack it how ever you want, and you can share with your friends and the world. Do that with Windows and you could get sued or prosecuted. With Linux, you get freedom.
But ultimately, the point I’m writing about has to do with trade policy. Here in the U.S., we have a bunch of “free trade” agreements. We have treaties such as NAFTA, we belong to organizations like the WTO, and we extend tremendous trading privileges to nations such as China, because the prevailing philosophy in government circles is to reduce barriers to trade, in other words, to make trade in goods and materials free-as-in-beer. There’s a huge problem. Just as there are multiple definitions of “free” in software, there is also a distinction in trade policy and their economic effects, and the biggest problem is that our current free-as-in-beer trade policy actually causes people here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world to have less economic freedom.
» Continue reading “Why free trade results in less freedom.”
Get it while it’s hot!!!
Download Linux Mint 6 for x64.
One notable thing: This particular release has the 64-bit alpha version of the Flash plugin, which is far more stable than the 32-bit x86 plugin run inside nspluginwrapper. It also comes with 64-bit Sun Java, with a 64-bit Firefox plugin – everything’s native!
I’ve personally had mixed results with the 64-bit Flash plugin – on my more modern laptop with the Core 2 Duo, it runs great – very stable, does its job. On an older system, which has one of the early AMD Athlon64 processors, in the past, I’ve had troubles – it was crashing. I’m suspecting some driver issue, though this sort of thing tends to be hard to narrow down. I guess I’ll find out.
Enjoy!
The fact that he’s President of the United States is a testament to that fact – the right-wing media, led by FOX News and personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, was going out of their way to smear Obama with the Ayers crap, the Rev. Wright crap, and anything they could find to hurt him. On top of that is the media’s refusal to broadcast his speeches, while they played McCain’s speeches and Palin’s speeches from beginning to end. Despite all that, he got elected.
Over and over, just when you think he’s about to get steamrolled, he comes up with new ways to steal the spotlight, like the race speech. He’s always coming up with new catchphrases and soundbites for the media, and comes up with new ways to be the news, so the media’s forced to cover him even though they want to bury him.
On top of that, there’s his use of the Internet to spread his message and completely bypass the media and their gatekeepers.
We’re seeing the same thing today. His speech last night, and his comments today reflecting that speech, got him into the spotlight. His order to cap the pay of executives in banks that are getting TARP money also got him headlines. The media and the GOP thought they had Obama down for the count with the Daschle tax scandal, and they got a news cycle out of it, but then he got right back up, and now he’s turning up the heat on Congress and pushing them to get that stimulus bill done. What’s also helping President Obama that because he is the President, the media cannot ignore him. They can blow off Senators and Congressmen, and they can certainly blow off spokespeople and other designated media flaks, but they cannot blow off the President.
President Obama, so far, is the only Democrat in Washington that plays the media so well. The Democrats in the House and Senate don’t have the mojo. Harry Reid in particular doesn’t get it – he always gets soundbited by the media saying something like “I hope we get the votes today.” sounding like Droopy Dog and making him look like a bullied wuss.
President Obama and his media people need to throw a seminar for Democrats on Capitol Hill titled “How to Game the Media When They Hate You.”
It’s clear that the only thing the Republicans want is to humiliate Obama. That’s all they care about. They will destroy this country to do it. They will leave us unemployed and starving and without health care and desperate to do it. They don’t give a damn about anybody except their billionaire country-club buddies – high on their to-do list is screaming about Obama’s capping of executive pay for recipients of TARP money.
Obama’s strategy for the first two weeks was to play nice. Either the Republicans will reciprocate, or they’ll make themselves look like assholes.
Guess what. They look like assholes.
It’s time for the second stage of the give-them-rope-to-hang-themselves strategy: making sure they’re hanged.
It’s time for Obama to stop acting like Abraham Lincoln and start acting like LBJ. Start twisting arms. Start using the bully pulpit and all the levers of political coercive force that the President can inflict upon his opponents, and drive them into submission.
Bipartisanship only works when both sides negotiate in good faith. They’re not. While we think bipartisanship is an equal game of give-and-take and mutual compromise and finding things in common, the Republicans think bipartisanship is forcing the Democrats to submit to them.
Fuck that. I’m not interested in the Republican kind of bipartisanship. If that’s all they have to offer, then to hell with it, let’s get hyper-partisan and get our way through naked force. It’s time the Republicans learn that they lost the election, they lost their access to the levers of power, and for the next four years, they need to shut the fuck up.
Which is it gonna be? That’s the question. President Obama and the Democratic Party have come out in favor of using basic economic theory of the kind you learn in a college Macroeconomics 101 course to pull our country out of the Bush Recession. Their response to the economic crisis is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
The Republicans throwing filibuster hissy-fits in the Senate have decided to use the economic wisdom of Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka “Joe the Plumber”. After throwing trillions of dollars of taxpayer money at the war in Iraq, and gleefully throwing 700 billion dollars more to banks under TARP, all of the sudden, they’ve become deficit hawks and have started howling about all the big government spending. They seemingly follow the advice of a man who isn’t an economist and isn’t a plumber.
We have our choice. Do we follow the economic advice of Nobel-Prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman, or do we continue the same disastrous policies of George W. Bush, now being sold by a plumber turned country-singer turned war-correspondent turned economic-guru?
Just how stupid is this country? Looks like quite a lot of us are stupid enough to happily eat horse manure. Keep reading…
» Continue reading “Nobel Economics or Joe The Plumber Economics?”
It’s been a busy week. President Obama’s been hard at work, and the Republicans have been continuing to be world champion drama queens. So, let’s just go through a few of the stories this week.
After President Obama learned that Citibank was going to take delivery of a brand new $50 million business jet, after taking billions of dollars of TARP bailout money, one of his aides called Citibank and said “Fix it!” in those words.
Yesterday, President Obama commented on the story that Wall Street executives took home 18.4 billion dollars in bonuses last year, while banks and Wall Street firms were hemorrhaging money. “That is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful. And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint and show some discipline and show some sense of responsibility.”
Keep kicking ass, Obama!
President Obama was right to start work on the stimulus package with a bipartisan approach. When possible, it’s good to get a broad bipartisan consensus when bringing legislation through Congress. Obama has bent over backwards to give the Republicans a chance to contribute the stimulus package, and he’s accomodated them in that he’s removed some funding for family-planning from the bill and added $275 billion in tax cuts.
That’s a lot more generous than I would have been.
Because while I dislike paying taxes as much as anyone else who works for a living, the fact is that tax cuts are a horribly inefficient way of stimulating the economy. You get far more bang for the buck doing things like building infrastructure – building roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, etc. than you get from tax cuts. Don’t believe me? Believe the economists – they’ve done the research and crunched the numbers. Here you go.
Rush Limbaugh has been acting out lately. Just this week, he said “I hope he fails.” about President Obama, and said
“We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.”
That’s just a taste. Limbaugh’s only the guy making headlines today. Tomorrow, it’ll be Sean Hannity, or Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter or a dozen others. But they’re just the talking heads. The truth is that we’re seeing a much larger right-wing noise machine than any fair and free market can support. A few big corporations have taken over most of the TV, radio and newspaper outlets in the country, and their owners want us to hear nothing but right-wing propaganda.
So, do you want to shut Rush up? Some suggest direct measures, like reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. But I’m not into censorship. The solution is to force the right wing blowhards to compete on a level playing field, and it can be done without encroachments on the First Amendment. The way to do it is to break up the corporate stranglehold on the media.
