Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer - Bloomberg

Go read the whole thing.--SS

Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer - Bloomberg:

"Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be."

Bonus Quote of the Day

Hey, #OWS, if you're scaring Frank, you're doing something right.--SS

Bonus Quote of the Day: "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to
death."

-- GOP strategist Frank Luntz, quoted by Yahoo News, noting the Occupy Wall Street protests are "having an impact on what the American people think of
capitalism."

Boeing Makes Peace With Its Unions

Union members should never vote Republican.--SS

Boeing Makes Peace With Its Unions:

Republicans have been making hay for months over the NLRB's decision to consider a complaint from one of Boeing's unions about their decision to build the 787 Dreamliner in a shiny, new, non-union plant in South Carolina. The union believed this decision was made in retaliation for past strikes — something that would be illegal — and they believed this because Boeing CEO Jim Albaugh practically bragged about it in public interviews. Nonetheless, Republicans were apoplectic over the union's decision to challenge a move they believed was made illegally, and they were doubly apoplectic over the gall of the NLRB in allowing the challenge to go forward. Apparently they should have simply been told to pound sand instead of being given a hearing on the merits of the case. GOP leaders in the House introduced a bill in September to strip the NLRB of its authority in cases like this, and a few weeks later Rick Perry thundered that the NLRB had "undermined our free-market system." (In front of a South Carolina audience, of course.)

Yesterday, though, Boeing took away the GOP's lollipop:

The deal announced Wednesday between Chicago-based Boeing and the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers, if ratified by union members, would help pave the way for a planned jump in production by the aerospace giant. It would alleviate the threat of strikes that could derail ambitious sales plans for a retooled version of Boeing's best-selling 737 aircraft, its new 787 Dreamliner and other jets.

Under the deal, Boeing said it will build the 737 Max, the retooled version, at a union plant in Renton, Wash. Boeing previously had said that work could go to another state, sparking anger from labor leaders and intense lobbying by politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In exchange, union leaders said that if their members approve the new deal, they will drop their opposition to Boeing's use of a new, nonunion plant in South Carolina to assemble some Dreamliners.

Hey, collective bargaining! I guess it works after all.

Why Your Pet Theory About The Financial Crisis Is Wrong

Why Your Pet Theory About The Financial Crisis Is Wrong:

I meant to quote this passage from Lost Decades: The Making of America's Debt Crisis and the Long Recovery in honor of Barney Frank's retirement since I think it's the ultimate refutation of the "Blame Fannie Mae" theory of the financial crisis. It's made all the more powerful for the fact that it doesn't even mention Fannie or Freddie:

Irish borrowing turned the country into a major financial center and created a housing bubble that put all others to shame. Between 1997 and 2007 the average house price in Dublin shot up from $115,000 to $550,000. This was remarkable for a medium-size city in a small country with an ample supply of buildable land. By 2007, the average house in Dublin cost two and a half times as much as the median house in America’s metropolitan areas, and substantially more than the median house in the New York metropolitan area. Most of this housing bubble was financed abroad—the net indebtedness of Irish banks to the rest of the world went from 10 percent of GDP in 2003 to 60 percent in early 2008.40 And it was accomplished without any unusual financial developments—no subprime mortgages, no novel approach to securitization. It was just an old-fashioned housing bubble, fueled by old-fashioned foreign borrowing.

The point is that while a lot of stuff happened in the vicinity of the house price boom, you don't need anything other than the boom itself to explain things. Both borrowers and lenders perceived the land to have become a lot more valuable and were thus willing to engage in a lot of additional borrowing and lending. Everything else is more or less gravy.

Where is my motivation?

Where is my motivation?:

I know nothing about psychology, but I’m guessing this proposition is hardly novel: people’s underlying motivations are often misunderstood, even (especially?) by themselves. This is why I can’t believe in rational markets, altruistic Galtians, or impartial pundits. Even if people believe they’re being rational, altruistic, or impartial, there’s a good chance that they’re not, and, to take it one step farther, their belief in their own rationality/altruism/impartiality may well indicate that they are merely delusional or narcissistic.

Atrios makes a good point apropos of the lock-out instigated by the mighty job-creators at the NBA:

Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run. The truth is, Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.

Likewise, Charles Pierce translates Ruth Marcus’s cry of the wounded school-marm thusly:

“I are an actual journalist. Please note my concern for the First Amendment, a quaint notion that I believe applies to me and to the eight people I had dinner with last night, and not necessarily to potty-mouthed high-schoolers.”

Marcus most likely wants to silence “potty-mouthed” high-schoolers because their tweets in some way undermine her own her influence, whether she or not she admits it (or even knows it).

When I discuss the American political scene with tote-baggers, the notion they resist the most is that we should question our Galtian and Village overlords’ underlying motivations. When I tell them, for example, that the establishment wants to cut Social Security and Medicare simply because they enjoy fucking the middle-class over, they tell me I am insane. When I ask them what other motivation there could be for replacing a reasonably efficient government health-care system with a less efficient private health care system, they have no answer.

Sheblowsalot

Sheblowsalot:

When Emma Sullivan began the process of humiliating Sam Brownback and his staff—I wholeheartedly agree with the Jim Newell headline “Tweeting Teen Completes Total Victory over Crybaby Kansas Governor”—I immediately wondered what vapid Village idiot will be the first to use this as pretext to lecture teh kids about rudeness and manners blah blah blah. It’s Ruth Marcus.

Emma Sullivan, you’re lucky you’re not my daughter. (Dangerous sentence, I know: My daughters might agree.)

If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smart­alecky, potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.

Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.

[....]

It is until we parents insist such language is not acceptable, explain that it is possible to disagree civilly — and insist on an apology when our children fall short.

If only we could disagree more civilly about the need to lie our way into unnecessary wars, to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, to torture, to eulogize mass-murdering tyrants. What a wonderful world this would be.

Tell me again that I’m wrong to wish for a meteor or a revolution.

Update. Also too:

After Willie Horton ads, Swiftboating, GOP convention-goers waving purple band-aids to mock a veteran’s war wounds, birtherism, Ann Coulter saying the “only choice was whether to impeach or assassinate” President Clinton, Coulter claiming 9/11 widows were “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” Rush Limbaugh mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease, ads falsely claiming Barack Obama favored “comprehensive sex education for Kindergartners,” Rand Paul supporters trying to stomp the head of a protester, ads claiming Kay Hagen was “godless,” Michelle Bachmann calling for an investigation of ‘un-American views” among the Congress, “If ballots don’t work, maybe bullets will,” “Obama hates white people,” ‘GET OFF MY PHONE YOU LITTLE PINHEAD!” “YOU LIE!”, wingnuts at FreeRepublic calling 11-year old Sasha Obama a “street whore” for wearing a peace sign on her t-shirt, outright lies about “death panels,” “Bury Obamacare with Kennedy,” cheering for executions, booing soldiers in war zones for being gay, comparing poor people to stray animals you shouldn’t feed, “’we’ve got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion,” supposed “Christians” suggesting that people pray for the President using Psalm 109:8 (“May his days be few; may another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow”) as a text, Limbaugh calling the First Lady “uppity,” and on and on and on, all without a single peep from the Right…They can take their whiny-ass bullshit about liberal “rudeness” and peddle it somewhere else. We ain’t buyin’ it here.

Occupy Wall Street Humor

Occupy Wall Street Humor:

Along with all the HUGE Occupy news today and this week, here are some good, ‘humours’ Occupy cartoons, graphs, and images:

Related posts:

1. Top Occupy Wall Street Cartoons (& Occupy Wall Street Round-Up)


2. Occupy Wall Street Cartoons, News, +


3. Occupy Oakland Pictures & Video (+ Occupy Wall Street Roundup)