Oct 11 2009
There is a clash of titan forces taking place in the American Economy right now. It’s a tale as old as Greed itself.
It is the tale of the “Powers that Be” running into the watchful eyes of the “World that Should Be”.
The story involves how corporate Robber Barons avoid the watchful glare of the citizen Muckrakers.
It is the tale of Deception and Greed vs Honesty and Fairness …
Feb 11 2009
Humans are hardwired to punish, and punishment is very effective at stopping undesired behavior. Many people believe that you have to put punishment on dogs using coercion, fear or intimidation to train them. This is called Positive Punishment.
The only problem with positive punishment is that there are often unintended consequences that arise the the use of it, sometimes these unintended consequences create more problems than they solve.
Positive trainers believe that reward and repetition and removal of good things (negative punishment) is better at creating, modifying and maintaining behavior than fear and intimidation.
This is sometimes a hard sell to clients. Some people will simply never be able to process and internalize the concepts of positive training, and that’s OK. We just send them to someone who employs fear and intimidation to train dogs. No big deal.
Ironically, the people most likely to be unable to accept positive training are the very people who are likely to believe that positive reinforcement and voluntary regulation will work for controlling institutional, human behavior, and that punishing them for bad behavior is wrong.
I have no idea why this is the case, but my experience tells me it is.
Nov 10 2008
The Washington Post reports that while most of the United States was distracted by the bank bailout legislation in late-September as the markets melted, U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quietly and illegally deregulated the tax law for the U.S. banking industry.
Paulson gave away a Quiet windfall by issuing a five-sentence notice.
The change to Section 382 of the tax code — a provision that limited a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers — came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because this would look like a corporate giveaway, according to lobbyists.
The reason it would look like a corporate giveaway is because it is a corporate giveaway — as much as $140 billion. Most tax lawyers think Paulson acted illegally, but Congress seems unwilling to call foul so not to risk being blamed for worsening the financial mess.
Sep 29 2008
Eighteen months ago, when the Department of Interior began talking about removing the gray wolf from the endangered species list, and leaving control of its population to the states, eco-advocates sent out a warning: if this goes forward, wolves will be eradicated. They were sneered at, called alarmists and ignored. Six months ago, on March 28, the wolf was removed from the endangered list in the northern Rockies,
The critics judged right. Nobody who knows the history of the wolf in the United States should be surprised. The government’s decision to delist might as well have included transportation to wolf country and free ammo for a few street gangs. The operative word for what occurred: slaughter. So the feds stepped back in last week.
You don’t have to be an animal rights activist to have your blood boiled by what Julie Cart writes about that slaughter in today’s Los Angeles Times. “Sportsmen” on snowmobiles rampaged through the area. They bragged that they’d shot a wolf. Some had them stuffed:
Sep 19 2008
Just when you thought things could not get worse, we face the specter of the rise of National Socialism in the United States. Because moneyed interests now control the US government, they intend to use the US Treasury as an insurance fund for their financial losses. This will be done to “protect” taxpayers, but it is basically the last stage of the looting of the American economy.
We now face the worst of both ugly worlds: the greed of a rapacious plutocracy coupled with the inefficiency and unaccountability of faceless government bureacracy. Politicians and propagandists will be quick to explain why the princes of commerce need to continue to be paid their astronomical salaries, while the taxpayers make good their losses.
This ridiculous denoument to our decaying society will end when foreign lenders effectively take control of our economy and restore rationality to our business affairs. What a sad end to a once great nation.
Mar 31 2008
This morning, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson formally announced his grand scheme to use America’s economic mess to consolidate power in the hands of the few, the economic pillagers at the Federal Reserve.
Under the guise of “increasing” regulation, Paulson’s scheme seeks to abolish the last vestiges of New Deal oversight on the U.S. economy and complete the deregulation of Wall Street. Paulson proposes nothing less than economic shock therapy to the U.S. financial sector. As The Guardian notes in its coverage of Paulson: “Big banks saw little to fear in the blueprint.”
Mar 29 2008
From The New York Times: White House to Seek New U.S. Power to Keep Markets Stable
The Bush administration will propose on Monday that Congress give the Federal Reserve broad authority to oversee financial market stability, in effect allowing it to send SWAT teams into any corner of the industry or any institution that might pose a risk to the overall system.
The proposal is part of a sweeping blueprint to overhaul the country’s hodge-podge of regulatory agencies, which many specialists say failed to recognize rampant excesses in mortgage lending until after they triggered what is now the worst financial calamity in decades.
I think this is precisely what Naomi Klein warned about in her book, The Shock Doctrine. I suspect the Bush administration is going to try to use the shock of the collapsing economy to quickly deregulate the entire economy to make it easier to loot.
Oct 07 2007
In an Op-Ed that was published in the Wall Street Journal last month (and is available in full to non-subscribers on CATO’s website) two CATO economists specialised in deregulation and energy markets provide a breath of fresh air in the debates on energy.
Their point is to criticize the poorly thought out deregulation in various US States over the past 15 years, and they explain clearly how energy markets work (something which is rare enough in the mainstream media), and what the consequences of various bits of deregulation are on market behavior and thus on electricity prices.
Their conclusions are so unexpected that other libertarians felt compelled to criticize them violently (and the authors felt the need to defend their libertarian credentials… Follow me below the fold for the gory details.