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Skeptical Debunker

Analysis: Republicans setting filibuster record - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/..._filibuster_gone_awry_analysis

Republican filibuster records

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 01 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Opposition Republicans are using the delaying tactic at a record-setting pace. "The numbers are astonishing in this Congress," says Jim Riddlesperger, political science professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. The filibuster, using seemingly endless debate to block legislative action, has become entrenched like a dandelion tap root in the midst of the shrill partisanship gripping Washington. But the filibuster is nothing new. Its use dates to the mists of Senate history, but until the civil rights era, it was rarely used.
  • As a matter of political philosophy, the concept of the filibuster arises from a deep-seated, historic concern among Americans that the minority not be steamrolled by the majority. It is a brake and protective device rooted in the same U.S. political sensibility that gave each state two senators regardless of population. The same impulse gave Americans the Electoral College in presidential contests — a structure from earliest U.S. history designed to give smaller population states greater influence in choosing the nation's leader. Given recent use of the filibuster by minority Republicans and the party's success in snarling the legislative process in this Congress, Democrats say the minority has gone way beyond just protecting its interests. The frequency of filibusters — plus threats to use them — are measured by the number of times the upper chamber votes on cloture. Such votes test the majority's ability to hold together 60 members to break a filibuster. In the 110th Congress of 2007-2008, with Republicans in the minority, there were a record 112 cloture votes. In the current session of Congress — the 111th — for all of 2009 and the first two months of 2010 the number already exceeds 40. The most the filibuster has been used when Democrats were in the minority was 58 times in the 106th Congress of 1999-2000.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 01 Mar 10
     
    Having railed against the Democratic minorities' use of ANY filibuster in the last several Congressional sessions when Republicans were in the majority, the Republicans now hypocritically are taking the use of the filibuster to new heights. Forgotten are their own strident and indignant demands that the "people" deserved the Senate allowing an "up or down vote". And that they would (and did) use a "nuclear option" or reconciliation if necessary to make that happen. The filibuster - tool of obstruction in the U.S. Senate - is alternately blamed and praised for wilting President Barack Obama's ambitious agenda. Some even say it's made the nation ungovernable.
Skeptical Debunker

In Past Decade, American Funds Created Most Wealth - Yahoo! News - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...americanfundscreatedmostwealth

mutual funds wealth decade performance

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Morningstar determined that Janus and Putnam were the two largest "wealth destroyers" during the decade, losing $58 billion and $46 billion, respectively. "Janus and Putnam rode the growth wave more than anyone else," Kinnel says. "They had some very aggressive funds that put up big numbers that got huge inflows." After the tech bubble burst, the funds that were most heavily invested in these types of holdings experienced huge sell-offs, which made it difficult for these funds to attract inflows through the remainder of the decade. According to Morningstar, American Funds created about $191 million in wealth for investors during the decade, followed by Vanguard and Fidelity. Since American Funds generally employs a more value-oriented strategy, the firm was largely able to avert the first bear market of the decade. "The 2000 to 2002 bear market was all growth and tech, and American barely touched that, whereas they had lots of value, dividend payers, and bonds, which did very well," Kinnel says. Recently, the tables have turned for American. In 2009, it lost the most of any fund family (more than $25 billion). No fund family, including American, was able to avoid the bear market of 2008. The same strategy that allowed American to bypass most of the first bear market failed because many well-known dividend-paying companies, like big financial firms, experienced huge losses.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 07 Mar 10
     
    In a decade with two bear markets and lackluster returns for many investors, American Funds created the most wealth for investors, while Janus destroyed the most wealth, according to a survey released by Morningstar. For the survey, Morningstar looked at the 50 largest mutual fund families and their total net assets at the end of 1999. Then the fund tracker subtracted each fund company's total cash flows over the decade and deducted their total net assets at the end of 2009. Numbers were calculated in dollar terms so that any funds that were liquidated during the decade would also be included.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 07 Mar 10
     
    Get this! Mutual funds, where most American's have their 401Ks, IRAs, and retirement savings, performed pitifully in the "great economy" of the 2000's (brought to you by Republican deregulationists starting with Ronald Reagan). The "best" made $191 million (but lost $25 billion in 2009!), the worst lost around $50 billion! What a great way to transfer all that hard earned savings, mostly by the "little guy", from them to the Wall Street gamblers. Another socialistic Republican "redistribution of wealth" of the corporate criminal rich, by the corporate criminal rich, and for the corporate criminal rich.
Sarah Eeee

Income Inequality and the 'Superstar Effect' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26excerpt.html

inequality capitalism economics

shared by Sarah Eeee on 27 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Yet the increasingly outsize rewards accruing to the nation’s elite clutch of superstars threaten to gum up this incentive mechanism. If only a very lucky few can aspire to a big reward, most workers are likely to conclude that it is not worth the effort to try.
  • It is true that the nation grew quite fast as inequality soared over the last three decades. Since 1980, the country’s gross domestic product per person has increased about 69 percent, even as the share of income accruing to the richest 1 percent of the population jumped to 36 percent from 22 percent. But the economy grew even faster — 83 percent per capita — from 1951 to 1980, when inequality declined when measured as the share of national income going to the very top of the population.
  • The cost for this tonic seems to be a drastic decline in Americans’ economic mobility. Since 1980, the weekly wage of the average worker on the factory floor has increased little more than 3 percent, after inflation. The United States is the rich country with the most skewed income distribution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average earnings of the richest 10 percent of Americans are 16 times those for the 10 percent at the bottom of the pile. That compares with a multiple of 8 in Britain and 5 in Sweden.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Not coincidentally, Americans are less economically mobile than people in other developed countries. There is a 42 percent chance that the son of an American man in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will be stuck in the same economic slot. The equivalent odds for a British man are 30 percent, and 25 percent for a Swede.
  • Just as technology gave pop stars a bigger fan base that could buy their CDs, download their singles and snap up their concert tickets, the combination of information technology and deregulation gave bankers an unprecedented opportunity to reap huge rewards. Investors piled into the top-rated funds that generated the highest returns. Rewards flowed in abundance to the most “productive” financiers, those that took the bigger risks and generated the biggest profits. Finance wasn’t always so richly paid. Financiers had a great time in the early decades of the 20th century: from 1909 to the mid-1930s, they typically made about 50 percent to 60 percent more than workers in other industries. But the stock market collapse of 1929 and the Great Depression changed all that. In 1934, corporate profits in the financial sector shrank to $236 million, one-eighth what they were five years earlier. Wages followed. From 1950 through about 1980, bankers and insurers made only 10 percent more than workers outside of finance, on average.
  • Then, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration unleashed a surge of deregulation. By 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act lay repealed. Banks could commingle with insurance companies at will. Ceilings on interest rates vanished. Banks could open branches anywhere. Unsurprisingly, the most highly educated returned to banking and finance. By 2005, the share of workers in the finance industry with a college education exceeded that of other industries by nearly 20 percentage points. By 2006, pay in the financial sector was again 70 percent higher than wages elsewhere in the private sector. A third of the 2009 Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance; 6.3 percent took jobs in government.
  • Then the financial industry blew up, taking out a good chunk of the world economy. Finance will not be tamed by tweaking the way bankers are paid. But bankers’ pay could be structured to discourage wanton risk taking
  • Sarah Eeee on 27 Dec 10
     
    (Part 2 of 2 - see first part below) What impact do the incredible salaries of superstars have on the rest of us? What has changed, technologically and socially, to precipitate these inequities? This article also offers a brief look at the relationship between income inequality and economic growth, comparing the US throughout its history and the US vis a vis several European countries.
Frank Schreiber

Engage and criticize: Obama's split media strategy - Yahoo! News - 1 views

news.yahoo.com/...us_obama_and_the_media

Obama politics news

shared by Frank Schreiber on 26 Oct 09 - Cached
  • President Barack Obama's critique is biting: The media prefer conflict over cooperation, encourage bad behavior and weaken the ability of leaders to help the nation. The White House's attempt to discredit Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party may have been getting the headlines, but it is only one recent window into Obama's already complex and crafty relationship with those who cover him.
    • Frank Schreiber
      Frank Schreiber on 26 Oct 09
       
      I think this is a real plus for the benefit of all of us.
Bakari Chavanu

The Greatest Threat to Global Food Security: Capitalism - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...lobal-food-security-capitalism

food capitalism

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Certainly one of our most fundamental of human needs is our ability to grow and procure adequate nutrition.
  • Giant multinational corporate entities like Cargill, Nestle, Monsanto, ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland
  • US Agribusiness spent $137 million on lobbying efforts to promote corporate interests through the purchase of favorable legislation
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • In fact, 95 percent of US soy, and 86 percent of US corn is genetically modified[iii].
  • Food Stamps for over 46 million Americans suffering in poverty 
  • Despite record farm profits (2012 saw the highest profits since 1973), the recent passage of the $1 trillion Farm Bill expands pay-outs to millionaire farming entities
  • Cargill, one of the largest food producers in the world and the world's largest privately-held corporation, boasted nearly $134 billion in sales last year alone[vii], more than the GDPs of Ecuador, Honduras, Laos and Serbia combined.
  • As of 2011, the United States Federal Drug Administration, tasked with ensuring the safety of America's food supply, inspected only 6 percent of domestic food producers and 0.4 percent of imports[viii]
  • According to the CDC, foodborn pathogens sicken 48 million people in the U.S. each year, resulting in 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths annually.
Bakari Chavanu

Bernie Sanders Flirted With 100% Marginal Tax on the Rich, Maximum Wage - Bloomberg Pol... - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...l-tax-on-the-rich-maximum-wage

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • “No. That's not 90 percent of your income, you know? That's the marginal.”
    • Bakari Chavanu
      Bakari Chavanu on 30 Nov 15
       
      Marginal tax is simply the amount of tax paid on an additional dollar of income. As income rises, so does the tax rate. This is different than a flat tax rate where you pay the same rate of tax no matter what your income level is.
  • Sanders is described as wanting to “make it illegal to amass more wealth than a human family could use in a lifetime.” He would do that, the article said, with “a 100 percent tax on incomes above this level ($ one million per year)” and “would recycle this money for the public need.”
  • he still had the issue on his mind while serving in the House in 1992, entering into the Congressional Record a Los Angeles Times op-ed written by Sam Pizzigati, the author of The Maximum Wage. In that piece, Pizzigati details President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposal for a “100% war supertax,”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Pizzigati noted that there’s been momentum in recent years to cap executive salaries and bonuses but that “Sanders saw the importance of thinking about that much earlier than everybody else.”
  • Benjamin Spock, who advocated capping incomes and inheritances. Spock believed that “not only should every family of four receive a minimum income of $6,500 annually but the wealthy should be entitled to a maximum income of $50,000 and a minimum annual inheritance of $55,000,” according to a Burlington Free Press article from September of that year.
Bakari Chavanu

Bernie Sanders is the best-known independent and "democratic socialist" in US politics ... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...bernie-sanders-socialist

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 30 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • democratic socialist
    • Bakari Chavanu
      Bakari Chavanu on 30 Nov 15
       
      He uses this term about dozen times.
  • Since the term "socialist" is generally considered an epithet in US politics, and since the two-party system is so powerful, no other prominent politician in recent decades has a similar background
  • He said that in those countries: "Health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours." "College education is virtually free." "People retire with better benefits." "Wages that people receive are often higher." "Distribution of wealth and income is much fairer. " "Their public education systems are generally stronger than ours." "By and large, their governments tend to represent the needs of their middle class and working families rather than billionaires and campaign contributors."
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