Crazier and crazier
What crazy times we live in.
President Obama is chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo and is promptly chastised as not being worthy of it as if it were his fault he was selected.
Employees of the mega banks that precipitated the current recession are slated to get record bonuses, this, after receiving huge amounts of taxpayer money to keep them functioning. The explanation is they have to compete with other institutions or they will lose the valued expertise of their employees. Is this not the very expertise that contributed mightily to this incredible financial tangle?
Citibank is on the edge of bankruptcy but found it in its heart to reward its leaders $22 billion. Morgan Stanley, projected to drop 6 percent in revenue, will pay out $16 billion, up 33 percent. At least Morgan Stanley has paid back its TARP money.
But there is more craziness afoot.
The public health insurance option, a plan backed by some 60 percent of the American people and which all the developed countries have, may fall by the wayside because the health industry is paying big money to certain members of Congress to kill it.
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Now, along comes Michael Moore, the ubiquitous conscience (according to some) of this nation. To be sure, conscience, in the old-fashioned sense, does seem in short supply on too many levels these days.
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Moore”™s topic this round is “Capitalism,” which needs serious examination. Glen Beck, TV personality and a favorite on the Fox Channel, says Moore hates capitalism. Not true ”“ he is critiquing it, an American right, isn”™t it? Beck goes on to say the nation was founded on capitalism but Moore points out capitalism is not enshrined in the Constitution. Individual rights are enshrined in the Constitution.
This film is one everyone should see because of the issues it raises. It”™s hard to dispute what it explores. When asked by Larry King on CNN what is the answer to this mess, Moore responded ”“ “More democracy!”
In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton University, takes a hard look at his profession in an attempt to explain how economists from coast to coast got it so wrong. Even with the lessons of the Great Depression still in memory economists again began to believe the actions of the markets reflected a “vision of capitalism as a perfect or near perfect system,” he wrote. “Economists fell back in love with the old idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations.”
Krugman goes on to describe Edward Prescott”™s explanation of high unemployment. In the 1980s at the University of Minnesota, Prescott suggested that workers work more when the environment is favorable and less when it is unfavorable. Unemployment is therefore a deliberate decision by workers to take time off. Krugman”™s response: “Was the Great Depression really the Great Vacation?”
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More craziness!
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Only a few months before President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1944 he gave a radio speech to the nation. At a certain point he asked the movie cameras to film the remainder of his speech.
The following is the recently unearthed portion of that speech, “The Economic Bill of Rights:
“The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines in the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.”
The concepts in the bill were picked up by several European countries after WWII. They are still missing from this nation.